


the sea doesn't care

by GoLBPodfics (GodOfLaundryBaskets), softlyblue



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: AU - Happy Ending, AU - Jon Never Existed, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Leitner Books (The Magnus Archives), M/M, Mental Instability, Podfic, Podfic Length: 7-10 Hours, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:01:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 57,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26239030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodOfLaundryBaskets/pseuds/GoLBPodfics, https://archiveofourown.org/users/softlyblue/pseuds/softlyblue
Summary: Years after the averted apocalypse, and Jonathan Sims is happy as he'll ever be in his life - he lives with Martin, he works with Basira, he sees his friends most weeks, he's happily wedged between the Beholding and the rest of the world.He hasn't seen a Leitner since the end of the world that wasn't, and he's content to keep it that way.But this one is different. If he reads this one, he vanishes. If he reads this one, he's in a world where he never existed.But the longer he lives in this world, the further he drifts from the things keeping him tethered - and is reality really better for having him in it?
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood/OMC, Oliver Banks & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 53
Kudos: 136
Collections: Rusty Quill Big Bang 2020





	1. Act One: Birth

**Author's Note:**

> it's been a long time in the making! im so pleased this fic turned out okay, and i hope you enjoy reading and listening along! 
> 
> the pilesofnonsense moderators have been wonderful through this challenge, and its been a joy working with godoflaundrybaskets. i really hope you have as much fun reading it as i have writing and working on it xx

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* * *

**Prologue: Library Card**

It sits on the shelf underneath a copy of _The Waste Land,_ much-annotated, and an unread copy of _Nostromo_ from the early eighties, with that distinctive smell of old printing-ink never disturbed. Nobody has opened it in a long time, or even looked at it. 

_On the Nature of Sin_ is small, bound in blue cloth, the title stitched in gold on the spine and embossed in the same colour on the front. It looks untouched, as indeed it is, but every double-fold page has been sliced separate in the style of those turn-of-the-century printing presses. 

It sits. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t even stink of the malignant. 

But it does give the definite impression of _waiting._

**Scene One: Making Savings**

Trevor hears about the _Book Shop_ from Martin, a quiet guy in his course that sits behind him during the lectures for Criticism and Theory.

He’s busy complaining to Sylvie about how expensive the set works are for the modernist module next semester when Martin leans forward - and he’s a big guy, Martin, but Trevor never really noticed before because of how quietly he sits, all shadowy and shit - and he says: “Sorry to interrupt, but I think I know a place you could probably get those books cheaper. If you liked. Without giving any money to Blackwells. If that’s the sort of thing you’re into.”

“Oh?” Sylvie turns around in her squeaky chair, already grinning, “Don’t apologise if you’re about to save me a hundred quid, mate. I need to live.”

And Martin (Black? Blackthorn? Blackwood? Something like that) smiles sheepishly. “I know this - it’s kind of out of the way, but it’s a second-hand bookshop and they do uni set works pretty cheap if you flash your student card at the people there.”

“You’re a lifesaver,” Trevor says sincerely, as Sylvie draws a satisfied strike through the _£120_ at the bottom of the list of books. “Where did you say this place was?”

Martin is one of the mature students, Trevor thinks, but not an _old_ guy or anything. He’s just one of those people that didn’t make it to uni right after sixth form for one reason or other, and if Trevor had to place him he wouldn’t put him very far past mid-thirty; his hair is a little bit silvery, at the edges, but he’s not one to judge because his hairline started receding right after GCSEs, like an army in tactical retreat no matter what product he pours on it, and Martin is in all other ways quite a youthful man. His face is round and handsome, and his glasses are the sensible horn-rimmed kind that always slide down his nose. His hair is an ashy-blonde, as pale almost as he is, and as he lifts his hand to push his glasses up his nose Trevor notices that his fingernails have been painted messily blue. He doesn’t wear a ring.

He’s cute, in a grown man sort of way. If Trevor was drunk and he saw him in the SU bar, he’d probably try and make a pass. 

“It’s - I’ll draw you a map,” Martin says quietly, as the lecturer starts in on Foucault, “It’s hard to find unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. Have you got a page - oh, yeah, that’ll do fine.”

On the inner leaf of Trevor’s copy of the _Norton Anthology,_ Martin draws out a map that begins from the Camden Town station and trails away from the well-worn tourist routes, down into the streets and alleys that London has grown almost completely on top of over the years. He earmarks road names and landmarks, spidery pen wobbling from the top of the thin paper almost to the bottom. Trevor watches the ink bleed through the thin, biblical paper, but he finds he doesn’t really care; he and Sylvie are a captive audience.

“And then you’ll find it on _this_ street,” Martin says, after a few minutes of intent direction-giving, “It won’t have a name, but it’s called the Book Shop. It’ll have a chair in the window - this like, teal kinda thing, and there’ll be a cat sleeping on the cushion. It’s open ‘til eight on weekdays.” 

“Thank you _so_ much,” Sylvie enthuses, taking Trevor’s book to look at the map herself. “You’ve saved my life. Man, you’ve saved my _budget._ I can probably go to that gaff with the Amnesty crowd now.”

Martin smiles uncertainly, and settles back in his seat, picking up a slim fountain pen with which he had been taking notes. “Um. No problem.”

The map, and Martin, and his aching future expenses, slip Trevor’s mind for several weeks. He has more important things to think about, really, between an essay coming up for his Medieval Language course and a date he’s going on with one of Sylvie’s friends from her theatre troupe, but eventually he realises he’s going to need to start reading next year’s books if he has any hope of keeping up with the pace of the course at all. Just as he’s thinking of going to Blackwells after all, and giving his money to the capitalist regime, he remembers the map in his _Norton_ and Martin Black-something in the Crit lecture. 

(Funny, really, how quickly Martin had slipped his mind.) 

He sends Sylvie a quick text, tells her he’s going to pick up his books for next semester and she’s welcome to join if she wants, but he isn’t too surprised when she says no. He fishes his earbuds out of the dish on his bedside locker where his pocket debris goes, finds his Oyster card hidden in his bedsheets, and shouts a perfunctory goodbye to Sam in the kitchen as he’s leaving. Trevor isn’t too hopeful about this place, because it might be cheap but it’s still London and everything costs an arm and a leg more than it should, but it’s worth a shot, _and_ he still needs to hit his step count for the day. 

He gets on the Tube at King’s Cross and changes at Euston, rattling along clinging to one of the dangling straps in the car, head buried in his Twitter feed. He’d taken a picture of Martin’s scribbled map before he left, and now he zooms in and tracks over it, trying to memorise the street names - the _Book Shop_ isn’t on Google Maps, because he’d tried to pin it before he left and failed miserably. Maybe it’s a hipster thing. He wouldn't put it past Camden. 

The day is wet and drizzly. Trevor feels morose, lonely, wandering through the bits of London he doesn’t usually go to - the bits he prides himself on avoiding because that’s _tourist stuff._ Even in this weather the stalls are out selling postcards and caps, t-shirts and scarves and things. _I went to London and all I got was this lousy t-shirt._

Trevor follows the map diligently, twisting through streets that get progressively narrower and more unfriendly, emptier, until he’s in a part of London he assumes is Camden just because it isn’t anywhere else. There’s a hot pot place next to a closed-down coffee shop, a twenty-four-hour kebab takeaway next to a solid wall of ancient graffiti. There is almost nobody on the street, and Trevor feels - uncomfortable, deeply so, in a way he never thought he could be in London. 

Down one more street and the feeling passes, and Trevor can see only one place here that looks like it still has any life about it; a warm, narrow shopfront. There is a chair there, and it's a pale shade of duck-egg blue, and sure enough, curled up on a cushion there with paws over its nose, there is a sleeping cat. 

Trevor texts Sylvie: _found cursed bookshop, entering now. if i dont check in in half an hour presume i have been killed._

He doesn’t bother to wait for a reply before he goes in. 

The _Book Shop_ is like one of those places he remembers vaguely in childhood, a narrow shop that seems to go back for miles and miles through doorways and corridors and mismatched wooden bookshelves. There is a long, low table in the middle of the main room, covered in books with no obvious rhyme or reason to their organisation. Most all of them are yellow and broken-spined, and those with the covers open have prices scrawled in pencil on the top corner, nothing more than two, three quid each. He almost forgets why he’s here, drawn magnetically to one of the heaps of books, the set list forgotten in his screenshots folder, when - 

“Oh, hello,” someone says, mild-mannered but crisply London, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you come in. Can I help you?”

Trevor startles, feeling like a child disturbed at something he shouldn’t have been doing, and turns around quickly. “No - no, I was just browsing. Um. Sorry, I should have called out.” 

“I should have said-” the man begins to look sheepish.

"That's okay, that's okay," Trevor says, hands still resting on the book cover, looking the man up and down. 

He looks exactly like the sort of person who would work in a shop like this, small and slight and bookish, dressed as though in grayscale, black jeans and dark boots leading up to a whitewashed yellow undershirt beneath an olive jumper. He wears glasses over sharp brown eyes, and there's a slim silver chain on the hooks of them, wrapping around his neck, the way Trevor's only ever seen his grandmother wear them. His hair is long and mostly brown, threaded with silver at the temples that trails down into the bun on his head, and he has one single earring, something Trevor can't quite make out. There are pockmarks, odd silvery scars, travelling up the length of his neck and partly over one cheek, and when he lifts his hand to push his glasses up his nose Trevor sees one of his hands is curled, clawed, pink with an old burn. A cane leans against one of the book tables; it can only belong to him. "Is there anything I can find for you?" He asks, sounding awkward, and Trevor realises he's been staring quite a while. 

"Oh, _yeah,_ actually,” Trevor snaps out of his odd daze and fumbles with his phone for the picture he’d taken of the set works list, “Can you help me with any of these?”

The man, as it turns out, very much can help him with most of the books. He seems to have a filing system that works for him, even if Trevor can’t make head nor tail of it; if there’s a title that isn’t immediately obvious, he just quiets for a second and his eyes go glazed and unfocused, like he’s flipping through a sort of mental index card. Trevor is impressed. 

He gets to pet the cat on his way out the door, laden down with books that should have cost over a hundred quid, having exchanged only twenty-three and a fifty pence piece he found in the recesses of his pocket. “Thank you!” He calls back with a twist of the neck, and the man by the counter gives him a small, awkwardly pleasant, wave. 

Satisfied, Trevor makes a mental note to tell his friends about the place, and promptly forgets all about it. 

**Scene Two: An Epilogue**

They brush their teeth side-by-side in the mornings, Jon slumped against Martin’s side with his eyes half-closed and dozy, Martin leaning against the sink so he can examine his chin for scruffy patches he might have missed shaving. Sometimes one of them will grunt wordlessly at the other, and they will shift accordingly so the grunter can look in the mirror instead, but since Jon always refuses to come to consciousness until long after he’s on his feet, mostly the person doing all the moving is Martin. He’s always been the early bird of the pair of them. 

“New smell,” Jon says, pressing his nose to Martin’s shoulder when Martin wriggles into his shirt of the day. “No? Yes?”

Martin waves a little bottle of cologne at him. “Old smell. Think Melanie bought it for me a few Christmasses ago and - ran out of the other stuff. Remind me to go to Next on the way home.”

“Go to Next on the way home,” Jon mumbles, the noise engulfed by the soft cotton shirt. He huffs a warm, amused breath; he makes that joke every single time, and laughs at himself every single time, and so Martin will set it up for as long as it keeps making him happy. “Was the old stuff from Next?”

“Yeah.” 

“Lovely.” 

Martin prods Jon gently into standing and they shuffle, sleepy, into the kitchenette on the other side of the hall, navigating around the laundry slung on a clotheshorse by the door. A photo hangs above the radiator, just at Martin’s eye-level, and he smiles at it every morning, the blurry film photo of himself, Tim, Sasha, and Jon outside the basement door to the Archives the day before their new department started. Jon had found it several months after the - their discovery, about Sasha and all she had become, and he had rushed to have it developed in person so as not to risk the film. The Sasha Martin remembers was tall and pale and she smiled like Daisy sometimes did in the height of hunting, but the Sasha in this one surviving relic is small and dark and holds onto Tim’s shoulder and looks as though she could take on the world with just a word. 

It isn’t much, but it’s more than they usually get. 

So - Martin looks at the photo, as he does every morning, and then Jon pulls him through for the day to begin. 

Their kettle is old and only boils when set on the electric base at a certain angle, so Martin does that while Jon fishes the coffee press out of the cupboard beside the fridge, kneeling with delicate slowness that means today is a bad leg day, already. They’re becoming more frequent as the weather turns to cold, and Martin isn’t _worried_ so much as he’s - aware. Jon pushes forward, Martin pulls back. 

(Martin pulls forward and Jon pushes back. So is the way of it on foggy mornings, on days when the streets are emptier than usual, in the night when Martin wakes up and Jon is still at the table reading so as not to disturb him.) 

(They catch each other somewhere around the middle, and holding on go forward.)

“D’you have a list for me?” Jon says, coffee press in hand now, standing with only a little grip on Martin’s wrist. “I’m going to Tesco on the way home.”

“Oh, in that case, yeah - yeah, we need loo roll and - rice, I think, and more coffee if you can get it. Not the own-brand stuff.”

“Okay,” Jon blinks and Martin can see him committing it to memory, adding it to the list of things he knows. His fingers are cold and thin on Martin’s wrist. “Anything else?”

“Yeah - _you_ need to eat.”

“Cornflakes,” and Jon shakes the box at him as though that will explain everything. 

Martin lets it rest because it’s morning and mornings are not for talking. He moves past Jon, squeezing between the table and his body, and as he passes he kisses him once, very gently on the top of the head. His hair smells of Pantene shampoo and their bedsheets, and Jon sighs and leans his head back, leaving his palm to rest on the round top of the coffee press. “Love you.”

“Love you too,” Martin presses his waist and then he’s out and past, pottering over to the fridge for the milk. “What are you doing today?”

“Sorting. Big, big donation from some old National Trust clearout down near Exeter, and we intercepted some of the boxes,” Jon ducks his head so Martin can swing open the cupboard with the mugs in. “I’ve been going through - through some of them, but it's pretty slow - pretty boring. Lots of census records and folios.”

“Census records and folios - _mmm,_ you really know how to get a man going,” Martin kisses him again just because he can reach, pouring a generous splash of milk into one and the barest hint into another. “So nothing of value, then?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say _that._ I know more about - about smallholdings in 1798 than I ever thought I would,” Jon twists this time so Martin kisses his nose, not high on his cheek as he had been aiming. “It just isn’t of - of conventional value. To anyone except me.”

“Mm. That ready?”

Jon pushes the press over the worktop to him, and then fumbles for the nearest chair to sink into it. He’s still in his pyjamas, an old t-shirt that might have been Georgie’s once and a pair of plaid flannel bottoms that Martin got him last Christmas. Marks and Sparks classics. Martin’s dressed already, but then he has class at nine, and Jon makes his own hours these days. Martin likes to see him dressed down, in any case, because Jon looks so different when he isn’t buttoned into shirts and bland trousers; he looks warm, and he smiles more, and he lets his hair out of the buns and ponytails and plaits for Martin to play with, and he falls asleep sometimes at the table with his cheek sliding down the prop of his hand. 

“I’m fine,” Jon says, to Martin’s cocked head. “Leg - but you knew that. I’m fine.”

“I’ll get it for you before I go,” Martin says, waving his hand vaguely in the direction of Jon’s cane by the door.

“Mm. Thanks.”

Cornflakes with sugar for Jon, and the milky coffee - toast with butter for Martin, and the coffee that would be black save for the cursory nod to milk. They eat in silence, a tiny Roberts radio between them plugged in beside the kettle, the man on Radio Four giving them the shipping forecast in measured, incomprehensible nonsense words. It reminds Martin of Peter, one of the only things about that man he can bear to remember, about how Peter would sit smoking damp rollups in the office and listen to the shipping forecast at midnight, at five, at noon, at five again, as intently as if he was on the boat right then. It used to make Martin feel like he was in the room with someone - 

And so they listen to the shipping forecast. It’s a little past five in the morning, now, but neither of them rise late anymore, and at least they both slept through the night. 

And so they listen to the shipping forecast. 

Martin will read for a while now, sitting on the big armchair beside the window in the lounge, and Jon will join him on the arm of the chair, perched on a space too small for him. He will begin sitting stiffly apart from Martin, his knee folded up to his chin, flipping through articles on the BBC app, but as the sun rises Jon will tilt further and further into the chair, and eventually he will be lying splayed into Martin completely, head on his shoulder, arm across his stomach, legs tangled together. 

Martin turns over the page in the _Pickwick Papers,_ quietly and slowly so as not to disturb him. He smiles into the crown of Jon's head where he knows Jon won't see it, and Jon makes a sleepy little noise, the way he does when he knows he's falling back asleep and he's too far along to really stop it. 

The sun rises slowly above the London skyline, casting warm orange glows onto the page. Jon brought Martin the book - Jon brings Martin most of his books, wrapped in the brown paper they use at the shop, with little notes written between the paper and the front cover. 

Jon is awkwardly sweet, when he wants to be. _Made me think of you,_ he will write, for Martin to discover whenever he pleases. _Hope you like this one. Are you having a good day?_

And always _I love you._ It’s written on the inside of this book, too, just underneath the title page, in Jon’s block-capital pencil print and a reply in Martin’s inky left-hand fountain pen scrawl. _I love you too._ Something similar is written on almost every book Martin owns, in margins, behind the front cover, under the barcode at the back, around the dedication page -

Georgie saw it, once, when she borrowed their copy of _Foucault’s Pendulum._ “This is gay,” she told Martin seriously, upon giving it back. 

He had laughed, and agreed. 

Against his shoulder Jon makes a small noise, and his cheek presses deeper into the soft wool of Martin’s jumper. He sleeps little and often these days, in small bursts short enough that he never gets the chance to dream, and against Martin the easiest; neither of them feel very comfortable sleeping alone, even now, and Martin always feels that little thrill of happiness in being trusted when Jon falls asleep next to him. Jon does it for only three people - for Martin, almost always, for Georgie on occasion, and for Daisy once in a blue moon. 

For Martin, almost always. 

As the clock shifts past eight, Martin moves, and Jon wakes up with slow, stiff limb movements. “Hm?”

“I have to go to class,” Martin says quietly, standing so Jon can tumble into the warm seat of the armchair proper. “But you can go back to sleep, if you want.”

“No,” Jon says, blinking up at him in disorientation, “No, I - Basira will be expecting me.”

“She will, I suppose, but lie there a little bit longer,” Martin presses his hand to Jon’s hair. “Look pretty.”

“Oh, shut up,” says Jon, as he always does, and then he kisses Martin as he always does, and as Martin is leaving he looks behind him and sees Jon curled up in the armchair, the throw over his knees, his hair untidy and his eyes flecked with sleep, toothpaste on his collar still. “I love you, Martin.”

“I know,” Martin says, and waits until Jon scowls at him before he says, “And I love you too, idiot.” He fetches the cane from the hallway and leaves it beside Jon’s chair, leaning against the arm there. He kisses him once more.

Then he closes the door behind him, and wraps his scarf around his neck, and clatters down the stairs to start the day. 

**Scene Three: Further Work**

Jon does lie in the armchair a while more, leafing his way back through the _Pickwick Papers_ until he gets to the part he had been at - Martin is almost fifty pages ahead of him, and Jon wants to catch up so they can read alongside one another again, Martin turning the pages because he reads a little slower than Jon does. His attention skitters away from the words every few seconds, onto the gnawing hunger in the place his belly might have been back before he was changed, but he can’t think about it right now. 

Basira will have something to say about it, no doubt. Martin has already _talked_ to him about it last night, but yesterday the man who came in had been one of his classmates, and Jon wasn’t about to - 

Eat - 

Feed? 

\- Whatever, on one of the people Martin talks to in the life he’s successfully leading outside the entities that manage to swallow the rest of them. So Jon hasn’t eaten in quite a while, and even he is starting to feel it now, in the heaviness where he leans on his cane, in the way his hands bend and shake so terribly that he can’t tie knots in the parcel paper, or tie the laces at the top of his boots without help. The zips down the sides help with that a little, even if his burnt hand isn’t much use for anything anymore. 

Yes - Martin is right. He’ll have to eat today. 

Jon gives the book up as a lost cause after twenty, thirty pages, dog-earing the page before he tucks it back between the chair cushion and the arm. He has to wrestle with his cane to make it from the lounge back into the bedroom, but it isn’t as bad as he thinks Martin sometimes fears, when he looks at him in the mornings. He checks his phone, and Basira’s texted just: _in now._

He dresses slowly, stiffly, in comfortable trousers and a dark old t-shirt that fits better than the one he wore to bed. Usually he would dress up but with one hand, and weak as he is, he can’t manage the buttons on the front of the shirts or the collars, and he hates having to ask Martin to do it. It makes him feel - 

So he shoves his head through the collar of his shirt, and doesn’t feel annoyed. 

The journey to the _Book Shop_ is pleasant, if only because Jon left long after the morning rush ended, and the narrow, winding streets dip into the Lonely enough that it gets rid of the last lingering crowd. His hand hurts, even when out of the wind and in the warmth of his pocket, but it means very little in the grand scheme of things, only that the day is turning colder. 

“Good morning,” says Basira, when he makes it through the door of the shop. In the window, Professor Kirke stretches and yawns, that loud, clicky-clacky stretch cats do when they squeeze the air out of every joint in their body. 

Jon strokes him softly behind the ear before moving deeper into the shop. “Enjoy the day trip?”

“Quite a bit, actually,” she replies. Smiles, and tugs on the trailing end of her dark hijab where she has it draped over her shoulder. “Daisy more than me, but we knew that was going to happen.”

“Well, I’m glad,” Jon walks slowly to the chair by his half-sorted box of books and lowers himself into it with the sort of noises he always used to associate with old men sitting down in coffee shops. He’s only thirty-four, but it isn’t like the past several years have been _nice_ to his body in any way, and despite the bucketloads of physical therapy he and - and Tim did around the time of the first attack on the Institute, he’s long become used to the thought that his leg will never be better.

“I saw a duck,” Basira offers, after a brief silence. “Hold on, let me-” her fingernails have been painted a light, shiny pink colour, and it contrasts prettily with the dark of her skin. Jon can hear the tapping of them on her phone screen as she unlocks it, and the way her mouth opens a little when she concentrates. “See?”

She presents him with an incredibly blurry, incredibly pixelated image of the sky zoomed in on a black dot. “Ah,” Jon says intelligently, “A duck.”

“Daisy got better pictures,” Basira says, folding her phone back in the pocket of her skirt, “But I think mine have soul. Heart. Y’know?”

“Of course. Art, not science.”

“I knew you’d get it.” 

They smile at each other, and Basira almost looks like she would laugh, her small lips pursed and her brown eyes light and merry. She looks brighter these days, and acts it, too, both her and Daisy free of the Met and the oppression of secrecy agreements and confusion and paperwork. No paperwork in the _Book Shop._ It doesn’t even really exist. 

(Martin still refuses to believe that, which Jon finds endearing. He’ll survive an apocalypse and he’ll kill an immortal body-hopping man and he’ll save his partner’s life multiple times through the power of love, but he draws the line at shops making profit without paying horrific amounts of London business tax.) 

“You look hungry,” Basira says, observation and not question. “Was anyone in yesterday?”

“Nobody relevant to your query,” Jon says. “Someone I think Martin sent, getting books for class, and some very determined tourists from the Lake District. But nobody…”

She shrugs. Basira, unlike Martin, can handle Jon pulling himself a lot further down before she truly intervenes. “I think you should probably give it a go today, though.”

“Probaby.”

“I meant you _should.”_

“Again, probably.”

After a while longer in silence, during which Jon loses himself in the mechanics of flipping through a book and setting it in one of three heaps - back room, front room, Oxfam - Basira stands, rubbing the flat of her palm against her high, dark cheek. She has filled since the end of the world that wasn’t, and where she was thin and tremulous and underfed in the Institute, she is rounder and brighter and smiles more often, hand under her chin. There is a long, pale scar over the bridge of her nose, and a bite mark on her wrist that she doesn’t hide anymore, which matches the mouth of a Beast Jon hasn’t seen since the day it bit her. She wears colour, now, sometimes, and she makes jokes. “I’m going to the back,” she says, a little unnecessarily, “But I’ll hear the bell, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jon waves her away, “Go on - go. I’ll tell you if anything exciting happens.” 

She shifts back through the shop, a cardboard box full of cloth-bound books in her arms, dust motes interrupted in the path of her leaving. Her shoelaces, Jon notices, are mismatched and colourful, which he attributes to Daisy almost certainly. 

Basira has left him only a little because she has her own work to do, her own - sustenance to take from the books she’s collected in her arms. Neither she nor Jon feel very comfortable taking things in company, and if someone comes into the shop - 

He turns a copy of _Neverwhere_ over in his hands, his finger slipping through a tear on the front cover. Jon read it in uni, when he was going on a bit of an alternative-London kick, but he’s pretty sure Martin never has, and so he creates a fourth little area for his sorted books. Home books. He’ll have to write notes to go inside them soon.

_Mansfield Park,_ front room, _The Da Vinci Code,_ Oxfam, _A History of the World in Eleven Compleat Chapters,_ back room. Not many people are aware of Julian Barnes’ follow-up book, published in 1991 to a more select audience, but those that are seek it out hungrily for the truths contained within it. Jon himself has never read the thing and never intends to, but the shop has collected three volumes so far and sold three almost immediately after gathering them, so it’s a valuable piece to keep in the back room. To keep where those with the knowledge of finding it almost certainly will. 

_Cambridge Guide to To The Lighthouse._ Front room, although he debates the back room for a second - but whatever Virginia Woolf did she did not do on purpose. 

_The Lord of the Rings,_ a rather handsomely bound edition from the 70s, he puts decidedly in the front room as well. 

Stephen Fry’s _The Liar_ goes to the back room, _Eragon_ to the front, and a lurid science fiction cover with a woman in debatable clothing and a greatsword - called _The Sword of the Mercurian Sky -_ goes to Oxfam. The box is almost halfway eaten down before Jon gets to any significant amount of esoteric, even esoteric-adjacent works, and his attention is plucked a lot more by the ones near the bottom; cancelled library books, a lot of privately-bound things, _ex libris John Smith,_ that sort of thing. Since the end of the world that wasn’t, Jon hasn’t seen a single one from the other particular library, but he is constantly vigilant. 

At least none of the rest of the books they’ve found, occult or not, seem to have the same effect Leitner’s do. Basira and Jon have a list of theories, and his personal favourite is spooky glue used in the bindings (suggested originally by Melanie). For whatever reason or other, Leitner is just special. 

Nearer one than noon, just as Jon is starting to really tremble around the books he holds, the bell over the door rings, and Jon looks up just in time to see a tall, dark person closing the door behind them, a thin, beringed hand twisting the knob shut. Professor Kirke mewls irritably at them, and they - ignoring Jon for the moment - snarl back at the cat, lips peeling back over incredibly sharp canines. They look almost as Daisy did, towards the end of all that. Their skin is dark but their hair has been dyed a dusty, dark grey, and when they finally turn to look at Jon they smile very, very wide and very, very red. 

Jon does not need to connect with his patron to know that they have been touched by the Hunt. “Hello,” he says mildly all the same, reaching for his cane to stand, bracing himself against the wall. 

“I hear that you can sell me some books, if I want them,” they say, swishing further into the shop until they’re leaning against the countertop, their boot tapping not impatiently on the floorboards. “You and the other Beholder.”

“You’ll have to settle for me - the other Beholder isn’t here at the moment,” Jon says. He can feel it there; he can see that they have a story for him. 

His mouth is watering. His burnt hand, still pressed against the wall, feels shaky. 

“And the payment is-?” 

“As before,” Jon says. “A statement. Taken directly from the subject.”

They smile again, and their fingers play with the brown wrapping paper on the countertop. “In that case, we can perfectly well do business. Do you have - now, let me think - _The Threatened’s Tale,_ it should be. I believe it was one of the first.”

“I’m almost certain we do, but I’ll look for it before payment,” Jon says, turning to walk heavily to the back room. There was a beaded curtain there before he and Basira began, but they took it down in favour of a heavy, iron-reinforced door, which only opens to the keys the two of them have. 

She is at the desk when he comes in, paging intently through a yellowing set of stapled-together photocopier pages. “Customer?”

“Looking for one of the Hunt’s Chaucers, I think,” Jon looks around the room, much more cluttered and messy than the front, filed according to their own personal system which is to blink and let the Eye tell them where a book is, rather than anything that makes sense to an outsider. “We have two, as far as I know.”

Basira’s eyes shutter for a second, but then, she always showed more of her Knowing than Jon did. “Top shelf by the window,” she says almost immediately, and then frowns at the weight Jon is clearly putting on his cane. “I’ll get it for you.” 

Neither Basira nor Jon are particularly tall, and so dotted around the high-ceilinged room are various plastic crates, wooden boxes, and various other ladderlike things for reaching high places. She steps up to one and stretches, and stretches, and Jon can see the book now within the box it was placed in. Can _See_ the book. It descends into view of his two normal eyes with a puff of dust, and Basira’s sigh of satisfaction. “This the one?”

“That’s the one,” says Jon, lifting it by the spine - it’s delicate, and handbound in red linen, with the title only an impression at the base of the cover. “I’ll be back after - after.”

“‘S okay.”

The Hunter is still out in the front room, paging through a collection of Will Self’s short stories, standing coiled like a sharp spring. They look up when Jon comes back in, and their eyes focus immediately on the book. “So you _do_ have it.”

“Statement first, please,” Jon sets the book down on the wrapping paper, and he can hear one of the tape recorders secreted around the top of the bookshelves click on. “Name - subject of statement, and date. Please.”

“My name is Max Norton,” says the Hunter, tongue flickering out to wet their lips, “My statement concerns my relationship with the development of the first Everchase in the seventies. Statement given sixteenth March, 2021.”

“Statement begins,” Jon whispers hoarsely, and his strength returns in slow heartbeats, and he can feel it building under his skin, the eyes that live in his body, the mouths shaped like pupils, hungrily drinking it all in. The world may have ended and begun again, but everyone needs to eat. 

**Scene Four: Written By The Victor**

The world may have ended and begun again, but everyone needs to eat. 

Martin shuffles through the Tesco Metro nearest campus, the wire basket hooked uncomfortably over his elbow, one earbud in and one out so he can still hear the bustle of busy London over the sound of the music. He used to need noise-cancelling headphones to go anywhere on his own - when he was with Jon he could just about manage it, but alone it quickly got too much, the pressure of a million more noises than he had become used to, but one day all that changed, and when he slipped them over his ears he could hear the rumbling staticy _nothing_ of the Lonely. Snatches of conversation, that’s the goal currently, and he can hear them chatting as he moves down the fruit aisle, reassuring rhubarb-and-custards that tell him he is not alone in the city. 

Jon will do the main shop on his way home from work, Martin knows, so he busies himself with treats instead of necessities. Jon is _bad_ at treats for himself and for everyone else, so Martin keeps their flat stocked with the biscuits and chocolate and sweets that keep the world turning. He likes it. 

Martin likes to be useful, and he knows Jon likes to be thought of. 

(Martin likes to be thought of, and Jon likes to be useful.)

Tonight is the night, and he knows Jon won’t have thought of the alcohol because he never does, so Martin stops in the little gated off-license community, hovering between a particular IPA he remembers enjoying and the sweet, dry cider he knows Jon likes. He ends up with a bottle of sparkling white wine for Melanie and Georgie, two bottles of Jon’s cider, and an oddly-shaped bottle of something with elderflower in it because he quite likes the shade of pink it is under the cap. In one ear, he’s listening to _The Dubliners_ ; in the other ear he’s carefully _not_ listening to the argument of the people ahead him in the queue, who are complaining at each other about whether to buy own-brand or McVities digestive biscuits. 

Martin likes going home during the end of the rush hour, pressed against other bodies, holding himself close inward to avoid the skin, looking at his shoes. He’s a big man - his shoulders are broad, and have always been so, and he had several awkward growth spurts when he was a teenager that have left him very tall indeed. His cheeks have always tended to the round, and he’s never much minded. He used to be embarrassed, almost, on the Tube in the evenings, about how much space he was taking up - 

And then later upset, when he would try to take up space and find it occupied by other bodies, unaware of his own - 

And now just content. Martin is content with most things and it's a better way to be than he thought it would. 

Peaceful, really. 

And now just content - “I’m home,” Martin calls quietly through the door, sliding his backpack from his shoulder to rest it by the door, the bottles clinking in there off the spiral spine of the notebook he uses to note his lectures. “Jon?”

There’s the sound of clattering in the kitchen, a spoon against a cup, and then Jon appears in the hallway, pink-cheeked, smiling. “Good evening, you. Nice day?”

“Interesting day. One of them thought the Romantics were the same as the Impressionists and we wasted half an hour on Google trying to prove them wrong.” Martin moves closer, very close, touches Jon on the cheek just because he can. “Did you eat?”

“Toast just there now,” Jon says. He turns his face to kiss Martin’s thumb, and smiles when Martin makes a huffy little _come on_ noise, “Yes - their name was Max. It was very filling.”

“Do you feel better?”

“Mostly.”

“I’ll take that,” Martin wants to kiss him back, and so he does, because he can. “Interesting?”

“Very. Was yours?”

“Moderately.”

“I’ll take that,” Jon echoes, smiling mischievously up at him. “Do you need to do anything before we go?”

“I’ll have another one of those, if you’re offering,” says Martin, and he laughs when Jon has to stand the tops of Martin’s boots to reach his lips and bestow another giggly kiss upon him. 

Daisy is the one who opens the door to Georgie’s flat. “Took you long enough to get here,” she says flatly, and then she smiles and scoops Jon into one of her delicate hugs, the ones where her arms are visibly straining so as not to squeeze. She’s wearing very tall, very bright hot-pink platform boots that bring her exactly to Jon’s height, and a weirdly-crocheted thing done in green and yellow she’s wrapped around her body, pinned with a plastic brooch at her left shoulder. She’s smiling. 

“Missed you,” Jon says into her hair, muffled enough that only she will hear - he wants the plausible deniability.

“Took you long enough,” is all she says again, and then turns and performs the same show with Martin, hugging him with the same amount of delicate fragility although he is almost twice her size. To a stranger it would look odd, probably, but Jon has seen Daisy - has _seen_ Daisy. 

Sometimes she holds Basira’s hand like she’s balancing something sugarspun on the tip of her finger - like if she grips at all the whole thing will snap. 

“How have you been? How’s the new place?” Martin asks, following her inside, Jon after Martin, pausing to quietly shut the door behind him. He doesn’t really need to lock it, but he does all the same because while they _can_ cope with anything, he’d prefer they didn’t have to. Let the monsters crash on the locked door while they laugh indoors.

Martin trails one hand slightly behind him as he follows Daisy, and Jon knows enough to snag onto it with a few fingers, leaning his cane by the door as he does. Martin’s hand is warm and dry. 

At the door to the kitchen Martin waves his bag in the air and goes in, but Jon and Daisy keep walking - the lounge is at the very end of the long, dark strip of hall, a room that stretches the breadth of the flat instead of being sliced in half by the corridor. “Can you walk?” Daisy asks Jon with something approaching concern, her eyes flickering from him to the cane by the door. “Did you drop it?”

“There was a statement, today. I’ll be fine,” Jon’s leg doesn’t even hurt, really, and it’s only the stiffness there that makes him limp the rest of the way. 

He knows she’s looking, all the same. 

The lounge is awash with gentle conversation and the sound of _The Queen is Dead_ crackling on Melanie’s old record player, dust and imperfections overlaying the music the way she likes to hear it - a unique object, a lived experience. She’s sitting by Georgie on the floor, using the largest sofa to prop up her back, one hand on Georgie’s knee and one on the Admiral’s back, fingers buried deeply in the long fur. “Took you long enough,” she says, turning her face in Jon’s direction, and he laughs and touches the back of her hand on the cat. 

“Got distracted,” he says, and she smiles _almost_ sweetly and touches his thumb on her hand. “Won’t happen again, very sorry, etcetera, et al. Continuing.”

“I’ll take it,” she says. “Sit down before you fall down.”

He does. 

Jon used to be uncomfortable around Melanie and Georgie - he used to be uncomfortable around basically everyone, including himself, but a month after nobody died Melanie had marched over to their flat and banged on the door and shouted herself red in the face about how he didn’t get to choose who liked him or not, and she was the best he had, and he had - 

Okay, he had cried a bit, and then she had told him to stop being a wanker, and they put on the audio-description version of _Doctor Who_ so Melanie could show Jon how much she was suffering, and then it - 

And then it had all worked out. 

“Stop thinking,” Melanie tells him now. Georgie has gotten up, muttering something about Doritos and salsa, and now it’s just the pair of them on the carpeted floor holding hands by the tip of their fingers. 

“Sorry.”

She laughs. “You should be. How’s - life?”

Jon can feel Daisy looking at him as he stretches out his leg, making a little exhaling noise as his tired muscle changes position. “Statement today - another Hunter. They all must be reminiscing right now, ‘cause I’ve taken three about the Everchase in the last six months. How’s… life?”

“Good, I guess. The numbers are pretty steady. The Patreon still isn’t doing… _much,_ but I think we’re about to do something really big. And Georgie’s started streaming online, if you saw.”

“Martin showed me the other day.”

A few weeks after the apocalypse that wasn't, they all collectively realised they still needed to _make money_ in order to live in a city as expensive as London, since nobody had actually known or ever would that they were the ones responsible for - pardon the phrase - saving the world. Martin had lost his mind altogether and started working at that department store in the centre of town, and Jon had quickly flung together the bookshop after a few months of living on his savings, and Daisy had gone back to working for the Met, but this time as a senior advisor, mostly using the influence of the hundreds of section 31 documents she'd signed over the years.

It was YouTube, in the end. "I never thought I'd be much good at education," Melanie had joked to Jon at the time, but he thought she was a lot more nervous than she wanted to let on. "I dunno. People like it."

The videos were short, but they grew longer the more they did them, and it was Melanie's blog at first - little clips of her talking at the camera, describing the change in her life after her accident; a car accident, as far as the internet is concerned. Georgie joined a little later, with videos chronicling her do-over of the Admiral's cat tree, and later with clips in a format she's most used to, Melanie joining to chat about the most accessible ghost stories Southern England has to offer. They have a deal with a few online academies.

Melanie smiles. "Yeah. I think it's going well. I do."

And Jon is happy for her, and for all of them.

In the kitchen Martin pours drinks for most of them - the cider for Jon, elderflower cordial for him, a sparkling white wine for Daisy and Georgie, and sweet fruit juice for Basira and Melanie. He passes a glass of the latter to Basira herself, who's sitting at the table taking advantage of the unguarded salsa. "Did he really eat as much as he said?"

"Don't worry," Basira looks at him with soft amusement, a lot of the edge gone from her as well. The bookshop has mellowed the bit of her that Beholds, the bit that itches for more knowledge. "They were _very_ good. And Jon still needs more about the Everchase, so I assume that did him even better. Was he - okay, when he came home?"

"Better than he's been in days."

She closes her eyes, running a finger along the rim of her glass, "Good. Yeah. Good."

"Did you get any?" Martin leans against the counter with his drink, although he doesn't take any yet; politeness dictates he should probably start ferrying drinks into the room, he hasn't seen Basira since last week, when the games night was hosted at her place. He’s missed her.

"Yeah," Basira says, "But I - Jon needs the living ones more than me. I've been eating, uh, household records from that National Trust place. Lots of land. Lots of cows."

"Excellent stuff," Martin passes her glasses as she stands, and they both shuffle away from the crisps before Georgie can come in and be disapproving at them, "I... yeah. Uni's been fun, too. I think you'd like some of the wankers in my class."

"A stunning review."

They laugh, and when Martin walks into the living room and sees Jon on the floor he can't help but beam, handing him the cider, pressing his hand to Jon's knuckles. "Having fun?"

"No," Melanie says blandly, taking the juice off Basira. "Just discussing how horrible you are."

"Understandable."

"Someone's been in at the salsa," Georgie announces herself into the room scooting the Admiral out of the way, a huge glass bowl of crisps and the jar of salsa balanced in her hands, "So nobody gets any. Sorry it had to be this way."

Melanie and Basira start to heckle her, and Daisy sits on the sofa, half asleep with the cat now lying on her stomach, and Martin sits down in one of the big armchairs and looks at Jon with the sort of happiness he thought he might never be able to feel again and he thinks -

Yes. This is what they deserve, at the end of the world and the beginning of another.

To be content and to have friends and to have salsa all down your arm, and a cat on you, and a partner, and Morrissey crooning in the background.

**Scene Five: Trouble In**

And so this is a little bit of what life is after the end of the world. Jon rests with his head on Martin's shoulder, watching his hand rise and fall with the rhythm of his breaths, and thinks - there are things left behind in his head by the Beholding, which has loosened its grasp on him only enough that he can function as a person, instead of a moving, walking, talking storage device. He knows things and he Knows things. He Knows the name of every person in the world who remembers the end of the world, and thankfully their numbers aren't too high; Avatars, the power-adjacent, the unwillingly-dragged, the unfortunate bystanders.

By and large the apocalypse didn't happen. For all but a fraction of the world it was a blip, perhaps a sleep more restless than usual, perhaps an odd childhood nightmare returned unexpectedly to haunt them -

But then morning came, and with it brought coffee pots and kisses that taste of toothpaste and promises to buy more milk and hands and children and sharing a photo that made you laugh to make the one you love laugh in return. 

Morning came for more than just Jon, for more than just Martin.

Martin turns over in his sleep so his back is to Jon, his blue t-shirt stretched over his broad shoulders, and Jon traces his thin fingertip across the creases in the fabric that come from having it bundled in the back of a drawer for several weeks before it was fished out again. Martin snuffles in his sleep.

Jon presses a kiss to the bare skin at the back of his neck, a kiss for every freckle there. They emerge in the sun, across the tops of Martin's arms and the back of his neck and high on his cheeks, freckles as light as the blonde of his hair, and he always laughs at Jon's fascination with them.

Again he kisses them. Just once, for each, to remind them.

On bad days, which are more common than any of them would like to admit, Jon can't leave the house for the overflow of information pouring into him from every direction and the overwhelming paranoia that arrives as a result, the thought in his head as certain as the sun in the sky that if he leaves Elias will have him (he will take his _eyes)_ or Tim will be there, laughing hollow and telling Jon that he can’t ever forgive him, or Sasha will be there with soulful eyes telling him she is unforgettable. On bad days Martin emails his seminar leaders and sits with Jon but not touching him, making endless cups of very bad herbal tea, the kind that Daisy buys in bulk in Lidl and gives to them more because she hasn't any room in her cupboards than because she thinks they'll use them.

On bad days Martin can't shower because the steam sends him spiralling into an uncomfortable vomiting fit on the bathroom floor, the rug imprinted roughly on his knees. Jon will text Basira and then sit there, his feet outstretched to press against Martin's thigh, just enough touch that he won't be overstimulated, just enough touch that Martin will know he's there. He will press his hand to Martin's forehead so the sweat and spittle and vomit doesn't cling to the hair there, and he will ignore whatever Martin says to him in the moment - about unreality and abandonment, and beaches, and love, and abominations, and monsters. He will turn the heating up until they can both finally feel it.

But the bad days come less often now, and sometimes there are good days, but most often there are just days.

Just days -

And that's fine. Jon can cope with days and Martin can, too.

His leg hurts when he lies on his side, with the bad leg to the mattress, and so Jon has to wriggle around until he is back-to-back with Martin, his least favourite position to sleep in. He feels stranded like this, with the blanket curled up to his chest bunched in his fists, but he only has to wait a few seconds before Martin makes a snuffly little sleepy noise and starts moving, and then a heavy arm comes down over Jon's side and Martin's legs scoop against his and everything is right with the world once more.

The room is dark, but not completely so. They have a little nightlight shaped like a ghost, because neither Jon nor Martin went to Ikea when they were younger and so neither of them had the excitement of it beaten out of them as children, and so when they'd been going to get knick-knacks for the flat they'd bought as many silly little things as they'd wanted to at the time.

(And neither of them like the dark much anymore.)

"Martin," Jon whispers, into the dark of his room, "I love you."

Martin snores.

(But he knows.)

Jon and Basira opened the _Book Shop_ shortly after the world resumed turning. The premises used to belong to a Lukas - not Peter, nor any of his siblings, but a distant cousin who was not estranged as Evan had been or as into the whole family commune as Peter had been. It was just an empty shop front when they found it, but it didn't take long to set the whole thing up, especially since it doesn't really exist for anyone apart from the insular community that visits it.

Basira came to their door one night, one very cold, very bitter night, and she had been shaking and if Jon valued his skin a little less he would have asked why she was crying -

But their friendship was tenuous back then, so he hadn't. He'd invited her in, instead.

She had told him over a cup of steaming hot chocolate (made the proper way with boiled milk and baking chocolate and tiny little marshmallows) what she was feeling - something she'd been scared to tell Daisy, in case she would hate her. About the hunger, and about how her hands shook, and about how she could feel the stories in people she walked by, and about how she had to hold her knees when she was on the Tube, because she could feel the desire to ask burning up the back of her throat.

At the time Jon had been barely even skin-and-bones, and he needed Martin's shoulder to make it even from the bedroom to the bathroom. He had been hungry. He had been _hungry._

So hungry, and so unwilling to do anything about it. He was sick of hurting people who hadn't asked to be hurt.

It had been Sasha before Basira (or at least, Jon thinks it had been Sasha before Basira) who had shown the most interest in the Eye over anything else, and now in the aftermath both of them had been bereft of something - Jon knew how close he was to it, at least, but he thinks it had come as a surprise for Basira, who always prided herself on holding that distance from any of the entities she studied.

Studied being the key word, of course.

So people pay in statements for Jon, and in information for Basira, and the Eye is fed and neither of them waste away and everything is almost fine again. He has his Martin, she has her Daisy, and of course Martin and Daisy have them in return.

"Balance," Basira said to him one day, her dark hand on his, two overlapping shades of brown with fingers linked together. "We're balanced."

Jon had made some silly Star Wars joke, and she'd smiled, but she had _smiled._

He's happier in the aftermath of the end of the world than he thought he ever would be.

**Scene Six: Discoveries**

The book sits at the very bottom of the third box out of four donated in the last National Trust sale. Jon took the job of sorting only because Basira has been busy, recently, cataloguing; usually, she likes nothing better than to dive as deep as she can into a heap of some old collection while Jon handles the human side of the operation, but she's been distracted and besides - Jon likes to sit in the quiet back room just as much as the next man, sorting books into uselessness and usefulness, into Fear and other, passing his hands over the covers, learning how they were made. _Divinity Lectures,_ decommissioned Cambridge Library Press books, a few old, scrappy paperbacks with the St. Andrews stamp on them - they all get sorted, one way or another, and they all get sold eventually for a story.

So the book sits at the very bottom of the box.

Jon doesn't even know what he's touching, at first, only that his fingers keep brushing against something that sends thrumming potential up his arm - he dismisses it as simply a very powerful book on one of the entities, on the Eye perhaps to cause such a strong reaction -

But certainly nothing to worry about.

Who sacrificed themselves to test it? Who bound it, who set the type backwards in its little ink press, who slicked the letters black and pressed them to paper?

Who died for it?

Eventually Jon comes to it. (They all knew he must; everyone knows that happiness, or even placid settlement, doesn't make for a very good story.)

"Who are _you,"_ he says to himself - there isn't a title on the cover, the spine, or even the back of the book, which is plainly-bound in a very pale, bleached sort of blue, like the sky in the early morning, the scrappy linen around the corners just beginning to wear away and expose the hard board beneath. When he flips the cover open, the inner leaf is just as obscure, just dark red with something written in uneven fountain pen ink across the top right corner. He has to squint to read it.

_For my dear M., in the hope she will read this some day and discover the change she has wrought._

Jon frowns at this; something's tugging at the edge of his mind, something very important, but he can't quite place it to hunt it down and he doesn't think much of it in any case. The note isn't dated and nothing about the handwriting itself raises alarm bells - it's just some gift presented from someone long-dead to someone else just as gone.

Or at least, that's what he thinks until he flips a few pages in and finds the title page -

_On The Nature Of Sin_ is the title of the book, the letters sitting ugly and squat on the delicate page. Uppercase, fat, horrible serif.

There is no author, but Jon's eyes skate unstoppably downward to the name he already knows will be there -

The bookplate is handsome, despite it all, and well should it be considering everything. Certainly better-set than the title, pressed harder into the paper, it looks everything it should be, slim curving lines around the image, a sort of Romantic border tangling around them, all flowers and hands only bone clinging as though forcing themselves out. The words inside are all uppercase again, in long, thin serif, and Jon has seen it enough times for the thing to register as an image instead of a phrase in front of him.

_From the Library of Jurgen Leitner._

Jon stands, a sharp pain shooting down through his leg, and throws the thing as hard as he can against the far wall of the bookshop, where it collides against a cabinet and falls behind a table. He's breathing heavy - very heavy - and his heart is thrumming in his chest. 

“Jon? Jon, are you-” Basira pauses in the doorway, her eyes wide and worried. “What-”

He waves his burnt hand in her direction, and tries not to notice how badly it’s shaking. “Nothing, nothing - it was nothing. A book, I feel, I-”

“Do you need your cane, or will-”

“I just need to-”

“-Call Martin-”

“-Sit down.” 

They look at each other for a moment, and then Jon laughs, mostly to alleviate the silence than out of any real amusement. “Sorry. I just got a little - a little carried away. I’ll… put the kettle on. Are you okay?”

“I am,” Basira looks just about as unconvinced as it’s possible to look, her hands back in the pockets of her long, colourful skirt. “Are you _sure_ you don’t want anything? You sounded pretty - I mean, that all sounded quite dramatic.”

“Just the dramatic that comes with me, I’m afraid,” Jon fishes his cane from beside the chair and moves towards her, towards the little table they set up beside the door with an extension cord, a cheap twenty-quid microwave from Asda, and an equally cheap kettle from Argos. There are little plastic takeaway boxes lined up against the wall skirting full of teabags, coffee sachets, and sugar packets; he reaches for the one with the tea in it, and the two chipped mugs they keep by their stack of cheap magazines. “But - tea?”

“Tea would be lovely,” says Basira, apparently admitting defeat. “And no calling Martin?”

“Oh, God, no. He’ll only be pulled out here for nothing, won’t he, and then we’ll all be embarrassed. No - no, it’s fine. But thank you,” Jon fiddles with the box, with the kettle, with the plugs, so Basira won’t see how even his good hand is shaking. He feels as though the centre of the room has changed, no longer he and Basira there, but the book by the far wall sitting smugly aware of the power it has over him - aware of everything it could do to hurt him, even after - 

After. 

They drink their tea in silence, listening to Radio Three on the wireless balanced on the windowsill, the aerial sticking as far out as Basira could extend it. 

“It’s been quiet, recently,” Basira says at last. “Have you noticed?”

“Noticed - what, the quiet?”

“The quiet.”

“Will you laugh at me if I say I haven’t?” Jon dips his thumb into his mouth, teeth scraping against his skin, tasting tea and salt and copper. 

She smiles instead. “You get involved in _everything,_ though, Jon. You treat Martin’s degree like a… a battle, or something. I suppose I won’t laugh.”

“You’re laughing now,” he accuses, to make her smile widen. 

“I just meant the quiet,” she says again, but she sounds a lot less serious, “You know - nothing’s gone wrong, nobody’s tried to kill anyone else…”

“Don’t jinx it,” Jon says. 

In the corner he can feel the book staring at him. _On The Nature of Sin._ But whose sin, and what nature?

He thinks he might be about to find out. 

That night, Jon can’t sleep. This in itself isn’t anything new, but he lies awake beside Martin and he’s not peaceful, he’s not thinking, he’s not _idle._ He isn’t restful. Martin’s arm stretches across his waist and his hand is comforting, warm, the sort of quiet Basira had meant, but - 

_On The Nature of Sin._

He can’t stop thinking about it. He hadn’t told Martin, when Martin came home from class with a smile and a kiss in his mouth for him, and he hadn’t told Martin when they were cooking, and he hadn’t told Martin when they were lying on the sofa together both reading _Far From the Maddening Crowd._

_(i like this one and i love you)_

_(i love you too)_

But he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it. Still can't stop thinking about it, even with Martin beside him, even with everything fine, even with his life so placid he hardly dares to believe it's real.

(Martin told Jon he loved him, earlier, as he does at least once a day, as he's done at least once a day for the two years, almost three, since they've been together, as though he's afraid Jon will forget if he doesn't keep reminding him. _Jonathan Sims,_ he had said, only through the door with his hands holding his backpack by the top handle, _you are the man I am in love with,_ and Jon had teased him about sounding like Mr Darcy and Martin had laughed and held him by the waist and kissed him beside the plants in the windowsill and Jonathan had felt like nobody more than a man in his thirties being in love in London, in a terribly overpriced flat with his lover. He had felt normal and had told Martin so and Martin had kissed him again and said: _you are anything but normal.)_

He can't think. His brain is split in two, in three, and only a few of those parts belong to him - there is a part of him that is the Eye, and that is aching to find out what's inside first-hand, and then there is a part of him that is the Jon that likes to be kissed by the kitchen sink that tells him not to look not to be _stupid,_ and then there is a part of him that is the Jon that joined the Archives out of simple, plain, curiosity.

He wants to know.

Whose sin? His own, or someone else's? Will it fill the gaps in a mystery he didn't know he was waiting on?

"Martin," Jon whispers, leaning across Martin's chest, his mouth across the round of Martin's cheeks, the silvery hair at his temples tickling his nose. "Are you awake?"

Martin is not awake, and snores as though to prove it.

Jon swings his legs over the side of the bed and reaches for his cane there against the wall, and moves as a man in a dream towards the bedroom door. He looks back once and sees Martin still and expressionless, and he thinks -

He doesn't know what he thinks, but it fills his mind with an inescapable greyness.

**Scene Seven: To Change**

_On The Nature of Sin_ is sitting on the front desk when he lets himself into the shop, placed exactly parallel to the edge of it, the plain cover facing him, just waiting to be opened. There is a part of Jon that's screaming at him to stop - to turn around and go back to Martin and get into bed and stop - but there's a part of him, and that is much larger, that wants to know. That hurts with the lack of knowing every second that continues without reading the book. The same part of him that makes him keep going, and the same part of him (the back of his mind knows) that means he can never stop what he begins.

(Statement of Jonah Magnus regarding Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.)

His hand, the one that shook Jude Perry's, doesn't shake when he reaches out to take the thing, his thumb crooked under the bottom corner of the cover. Sometimes he forgets that Leitner was active only as recently as the 1990s, and that his books are _of course_ as new and beautifully-presented as they are; even if _On The Nature of Sin_ is one of the early ones, it can't be older than about forty years. The blue cloth is rough, but not fraying, on his skin.

He skips past the dedication to _M.,_ whoever they are, past the frontispiece and the beautifully horrible decoration around Leitner's name, and past the title page, and past the contents page. It is almost blank - there are three parts. _In Birth, In Life, In Death._ Jon is reminded of the Dan Brown lookalikes, the terrible numerology theories, the Umberto Eco copycats of the noughties that wrote all those books about the real Holy Grail being the friends we made along the way, or something.

When he runs his fingertips over the letters, he can feel the raised bumps in the paper. Leitner's books are printing-press jobs, then, not something digitally printed, and although Jon knew that in _theory_ there's a certain heady excitement that comes with holding a book so carefully made. Even the page numbers have been firmly pressed into each slice of paper, and the edging has been sliced - delicately sliced, but sliced all the same - the way Jon has only seen done of very old academic books from the university presses. He holds the book for a long time just feeling the paper, and when he tries to blink and focus his eyes, he finds he can't.

His cane rests against the desk, beside his hip. He tries to open his mouth and say something, even to himself, but when his lips part no sound comes out, just a warm exhalation rushing past dry skin.

_In Birth._

"In Birth," he says, and he's horrified to find he recognises the voice that comes out - he met the voice, he talked to the voice, he pulled a statement out of the voice before he even knew how to do it. An old, pompous man, a round English accent, worn thick by years of cowardice and other people's sacrifice. "In Birth," Jon says again with Jurgen Leitner's voice, "Even then we sin."

Oh, god. He doesn’t want to do this. He’s done it and he doesn’t want to do it.

He wonders if Martin will wake during the night and come for him; Martin is restless sometimes still, and he gets bad dreams, and he wakes up and nothing can comfort him but the presence of someone else. He wonders if he will die - and then he wonders who will help Martin. He wonders if Basira would do it, or if Martin would lose himself in the Lonely again just as quickly as happened the first time.

"Much has been written about Original Sin. Every child who is born, every being that gestates, every bundle of flesh has eaten of the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is not true. Original Sin is not the things you have done in the form before this one; the sin of Birth is of being born, and of changing the world you find you live in for the worse." Jon wants to stop reading.

Jon wants to go home.

"The Sin of Being Born," he reads in Leitner's silky, lecherous voice, "Is one every child is guilty of in an active sense. _To you, Jonathan. To be born to trap your father into a marriage he was already plotting escape from. To be born to your mother, who wanted nothing more than to go home, to be a young woman as she should have been, and then to ruin the last years of your grandmother's life in caring for a child she thought should never have been created when she should have been living in peaceful retirement - this is the nature of Sin."_

He doesn't realise he's crying until he feels salt on his tongue, and something wet on the end of his nose, but he can't move his hands away from the book to brush them away.

"You can change the sin of Birth," says Leitner, but now there is a second voice overlaying his, another Jon recognises but cannot place. He's pulling away with all his might, trying to tug himself out of the book and into himself again, but he can't. He _can't._ He was designed to be something to read from, not something to have agency - not something to pull and succeed.

"You can place yourself outside the Sin of Birth, so that the Sins of Life and Death never come to fruition. The Sins of Life and Death may be lasting, may be stronger, but the Sin of Birth is the cornerstone upon which all are built. You can remove the Sin of Birth. _Don't you want to, Jonathan? Don't you want to see the life that others could have led without you? Don't you want to see what would have happened if only you had stopped months before - if only you had stopped before you existed. Don't you want to know?"_

"No," Jon whispers in between paragraphs, and the effort of saying is so strong he tastes blood in the back of his throat, and he knows the book has strengthened its hold. That was his chance and now it's gone, like peeling limpets off rocks beside the ocean - one chance, and then their hold is tight forever.

"You can place yourself without Birth. It only takes the strength to read on."

Jon's hand is reaching for the next page, the little fold in the corner where someone long ago has bent the paper over and over and over again, like they were getting up the courage to turn it. Which one? Jurgen had mentioned some assistants by name, but Jon guesses they weren't the only ones. Whose birth has been undone?

His hand is pulling, now, and he tries to shut his eyes so he won't see the words but it's too late - it's been too late ever since he found the book, and it'll always be too late for him, and maybe he deserves it.

He can't close his eyes.

He can't close his eyes, and his mouth is saying words now that he doesn't know the meaning to, and the whole of the next page is just a crude drawing of a house the way a child would, the ground and a little triangular roof and three windows and a door, and the sun in the top corner of the page with five straight rays coming out of it. There are three stick figures beside the house all holding hands, and each figure is labelled with an arrow helpfully pointing them out - but there is one label too many.

_Nana,_ the first arrow says. The second: _Daddy._ Then: _Mummy._ The fourth one is a little lower, as though the stick figure it should be pointing to is shorter, but the arrow points to only empty air. _Jonathan._

Jon tries to breathe, his hand wrapped around his throat like he can pull the invisible talons away, but it's too late -

It's always been too late -

_"Martin,"_ he manages to say, and then there was never anybody in the shop at all, and the book is gone from the countertop. Was never there on the countertop. You must have mistaken it for something else, I’m sorry - 


	2. Act Two: Life

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**Scene Eight: That Could Have Been**

It has been a long day for Martin Blackwood, the sort of day he wishes he could just stop having, but that seem to keep coming without taking his feelings into account. Work had been boring but long, _long,_ and he’s wrung out, tired of so many exhausting interactions in one exhausting day. He almost considers not getting the Tube - he hates it on days like this, crammed in with so many people and the smell of warm basement - but the alternative is walking over an hour in the clammy air, and right at the entrance to the station he decides to just bite the bullet and get the damn train. Being scared of the Underground is stupid, and Martin isn’t stupid.

Martin  _ isn’t  _ stupid.

No, Martin isn’t stupid. He’s just tired. 

The journey is long and boring, and Martin ends up squashed standing beside an advertisement telling him to  _ mind the gap  _ as though he hasn't done so already to get on the bloody train, and despite how small he tries to make himself he's still a big man in a limited space and he catches glares from a good few people trying to fit into a place far too tight to squeeze them all in. The Tube during rush hour smells of sweat and hot dust and eggs and Subway sandwiches in the worst of ways - Martin wishes he'd had the forethought to catch the second of the paired trains, but he's been in such a daze since leaving work that he hardly had to think about it.

Working at the Magnus Institute has it's bonuses. Nice pay, much nicer than Martin could hope to aim for considering he's never even aimed for an  _ apprenticeship  _ after his aborted chance at sixth form; nice coworkers, for a given value of nice, a little over-friendly but then who isn't, this deep into your thirties with no meaningful connections? Nice enough hours, nice enough work, neither too boring nor too high-pressure. In fact it's exactly what Martin would have said his ideal - and achievable - job was, back if you'd asked the  _ him _ of fifteen years ago. An office. Research. Friends to go to the pub with on Friday afternoons. Weekends off.

Working at the Magnus Institute also has its negatives; it's the weirdest place Martin has  _ ever  _ worked at, including that chippy that turned out to be a front for the owner's tax-dodging schemes, and including those few months he helped out at this independent vegan coffee shop that wouldn't let him wear his favourite (and only, really) nice pair of boots into work.

"I'm home," he calls into the dark hall of his flat, his keys jingling as he hangs them up on the peg beside the door. "Jamie? You here?"

Jamie is obviously  _ not  _ here. There's no light coming from under the kitchen door or their bedroom, and the lounge door is open the way it was when Martin left it that morning, propped against the far wall with a heavy rice-stuffed doorstop his mother bought him from Marks & Sparks last Christmas. Housewarming. Forgiveness in the form of a present.

Jamie isn't here, so Martin feels okay about pulling his phone out of his pocket and ringing her - he hates the way Jamie looks at him when he does, like Martin is some helpless puppy found on the street that keeps begging after scraps that aren't coming. Martin  _ isn’t  _ stupid.

He knows when he’s being used.

The phone rings for seven or eight cycles, during which Martin shrugs off his coat and his shoes and his satchel, slinging the first two by the door and the last on one of the chairs in the kitchen.

He hits the kettle on. Fishes around for a teabag.  _ Ring-ring. _

And at last, no ringing, and just the sound of someone breathing down the phone line. "Hey," Martin says, pinning the thing to his ear with his shoulder, opening the fridge - no milk, which means he'll either have to text Jamie or run out and get some more himself. Probably better to try and get some. Jamie doesn't tend to check his phone when he's walking, and there's no signal down the Underground. "Hey," he repeats, after some more breaths, "Are you okay? Sorry I didn't ring earlier. Had a meeting with the boss."

He had, in fact, been pulled away from his desk by Tim, one of the loudest of the people Martin hesitates to call  _ work friends.  _ "It's Thursday," Tim had said, eyes glittering, "And I say we go out for lunch. My treat."

_ "A meeting with the boss sounds important,"  _ she says. Her voice is more and more scratchy with every phone call, but Martin imagines she doesn't use it very much unless one of the nurses is in, and he's had to cut his visits down quite severely since he moved in with Jamie.  _ "What did you do?" _

"Nothing, nothing. Just a... monthly review. He's very on it."

_ "He sounds very on it." _

Martin wonders which way she'll take it this time. Jamie has given him enough distance to agree with  _ some  _ of what he says, but never all of it - Jamie also has a tendency to exaggerate, and especially about this. Martin is a grown man, for God's sake. "Um. He's... a nice boss. How was Róisín today?"

_ "She came yesterday. I didn't think you would forget." _

Martin knows for a fact, because he's the one she texts, that Róisín comes to his mother on Thursdays, and that she’s just left half an hour ago. Half two to five, that’s the deal. "Sorry. Yeah. Sorry, I must have forgotten."

There's a sound on the phone like wicker creaking, and he can see her just as plainly as he might if she was in front of him, bending laboriously out of the old chair he bought when he turned twenty-five and got that job in the coffee shop. Up from eight quid to eleven quid an hour, and he was dumping a few pounds every week into the fund for himself, too. It had seemed like a fortune.  _ "You did forget. Are you coming down tonight?" _

"Um. Um. Not tonight," Martin flips off the kettle right before it can reach the boil, a deep unwellness springing in him when he looks at the dry teabag in his mug. "Um. I have - work."

_ "No, you don't." _

"Extra work. From my job."

_ "You can do it here." _

"Um. Um. I need the internet connection."

_ "Oh, that's fine,"  _ she sighs very heavily, and the microphone on her phone blows static for a second.  _ "I suppose you'll be down tomorrow, then." _

"Um."

_ "No work on Fridays. You  _ told  _ me." _

He had told her, although Jamie wanted him not to, but she's his mother - she's his  _ mum,  _ for Chrissakes, she's meant to know these things about him, no matter how strained their relationship might grow. When she looks at him Martin knows she can see every lie he's ever told her. "I'll be down tomorrow."

_ "I suppose you will." _

"Um. Uh-"

_ "Bye, then."  _ She hangs up first - she always hangs up first.

Martin leans over the sink for a moment, clutching his phone, feeling burningly and achingly angry at the world before he swallows it and the unwellness eats it whole like the feeling never really existed at all. He hadn't bothered to turn on the light in the kitchen when he came in, and so the only light comes from the lamp across the street, out the window, casting horribly false orange shade on his hand clenched over the tap.

There's the sound of a second key scrabbling in the lock, and Jamie's voice down the hall: "Martin? Anybody there?"

"Kitchen," Martin calls quietly out, shutting his eyes until they feel less like burning.

There's the sound of rustling bags and things, and Martin feels the hot warmth of Jamie against him, both arms wrapping around his waist, open lips pressing against the back of his neck. "Hello, handsome," Jamie murmurs like a spell, the same way he does every time he sees Martin after they've been parted for more than a few hours. "How was work?"

Martin fixes a smile on his face before Jamie can see him. "Work was -  _ fine.  _ Got lunch out with Tim. This little deli. They did insane peppered salami in a sandwich. How are you?"

"I'm in love," says Jamie, and Martin groans.

_ "Gross." _

Jamie smiles against the back of his neck. "I hate you?"

"Better," Martin turns, and Jamie straightens from where he was bending, up to his full height a few inches above him. Jamie's one of the only people Martin's ever met who's comfortably taller than him, and he's whip-muscular from a life of addiction to long distance running. He's pale, with dark, toothbrush-bristly hair shaved tight to his skull, and warm, dark eyes. He kisses like it's the only thing he wants to do in the world. "Seriously - how was your day?"

"It was fine. It was okay. It was - I mean, it was long, but it was fine. I saw Alexis again, and she seems better, y'know? It was nice. Slow and steady, slow and steady," Jamie bends his head to kiss Martin and Martin lets it happen, not responding so much as relaxing into the hold of someone who loves him. "I'm so lucky to have you, you know? I'm so lucky. So lucky."

"I am," Martin whispers, and lets Jamie tug him into bed with the teabag still dry in the mug, and he wonders why -

He wonders why -

Something seems off. He can't place it, but it's there. And he keeps  _ almost  _ calling Jamie something else, a name that slips off the end of his tongue as soon as it tries to place itself there -

But it's been a long, long day, and Martin is tired, and he has a loving partner that wants to take him to bed and so he goes obediently and works through the motions, and makes all the right noises, and lies awake beside Jamie with his head on his chest long after the other man has gone to sleep and  _ still  _ there is wrongness.

Martin pins it down to a hazard of being Martin and rolls over and tries to count sheep.

  
**Scene Nine: The Searching**  


“Martin?  _ Martin!”  _

It reminds Jon of nothing more than being trapped in the Lonely, of those horrible, clinging hours looking for signs of anything on the beach-that-wasn’t-there, on the shore in the basement. Things stick to his wrists, to his exposed skin, like wet cotton-wool against his bones, and his ankles feel at constant risk of being stopped - grabbed - slithered upon by things unknown. He can’t think. He can’t breathe. He can’t know, he can’t see, he can’t hear; all he can do is shout for Martin, and then for Daisy, and for Georgie and Basira and Melanie, and  _ mummy  _ and  _ daddy  _ and  _ granna! _ until his voice is cracked and reedy and he can taste something wet and hot and metallic in his mouth. He falls to something that might have once been ground. 

Jon is not sure how long it's been, but he's certainly slept plenty and walked plenty more; he gave up shouting after a few repeats of this cycle, because all it seemed to be doing was hurting his throat and making it harder to walk in any case, and in all the time he's been here he hasn't seen a single other person. He doesn't want to be here forever, but maybe he already has.

It was that damn book and the Beholding. Everyone he speaks to about their relationship with their... patron, their entity, talks about the uniqueness they have, the individual thing that marks them out as a distinct being within it. Max Norton from just before.  _ They  _ were of the Hunt, and their features were beautiful and they talked about the Everchase with the sort of love a parent reserves for a child's birth, and they talked about their relationship with the Hunt like something romantic. A chase between hearts still beating.

Take Basira, for example. She is as much now an avatar of the Eye as Jon ever was, but her thirst for terrible knowledge doesn't lead her to accosting innocents in the local Sainsburys; she feeds the Beholding within her by organisation, by arrangement, by viewing the world in the separations she divines for it. Elias - as far as Jon is aware - never had to suck any stories out for any reason other than the fact that he enjoyed it.

Jon is terribly weak.

His leg doesn't ache, but he's aware of the limping anyway. He never really went in for the physical therapy the way Tim had, and Jon had (has) the habit of picking away at his skin, and so long after Tim's scars healed Jon's were pink and blistering, and his leg refused to work unless he bullied at it, and eventually he had to bite the bullet and buy the cane he uses to this day. In the fog of being unborn he doesn't feel the  _ pain  _ so much as he feels the lack of any feeling, but he knows he's walking jaggedly, unevenly without the cane. He left it in the shop.

He didn't leave it in the shop, because he was never in the shop to leave it there.

Jon doesn't know how long he's in the fog of being unborn.

He doesn't get hungry. He doesn't get thirsty.

No, that isn't true - he feels both of them, hunger and thirst, deeply and extremely, but after a certain point they had both bottomed out into something blissful beyond both feelings, an intense emptiness he finds hard to place. He knows his whole body feels smaller. He wonders how disfigured he will look if he ever gets out of here.

(He doesn't think he ever will, really, but it's nice to have something to think about.)

And it is after countless cycles of walking and resting and thinking about Martin and about the softness of his skin in the night, the taste of him after he's just brushed his teeth, the look on his face when he's reading and his brows furrow ever so slightly, that Jon becomes aware of the sinking fog pulling away from him.

It happens first without his notice; his vision clearing, exposing whiteness of much the same shade as the fog that came before, but then he feels the clinging to his wrists and his ankles begin to fade away, the damp  _ everything  _ of cloud vanishing away from his clothes and leaving beautifully cool, dry air behind. He blinks. "Martin?"

And sees a familiar house. A familiar gate. A familiar overgrown garden, dandelions knee-high, daisies out of control, nettles pulling at the hedges like overfriendly pets because they never had the cash really spare to pay one of the local boys to cut the grass once Colin died.

"I found another one," calls out a voice from inside the garden and Jon is moving towards the open white gate before he can stop himself, as though a hand has reached around his waist and is pulling him forward.

He moves through the hedge like mist.

He doesn't notice. 

Surely this is some version of hell invented just for him.

"Another one?" A woman appears framed in the back door of the house, her greying dark hair up in a lumpy, quick ponytail, her eyes and cheeks wrinkled the way faces do when they hit their mid-fifties. "God, she must have been - it must have been a lot worse than I thought."

"Maya..." The man gets to his feet. Tall, skinny, pale skin, hair a shock of dark grey, eyes brown and serious.

Jon knows that name. He knows what the man will be called, too.

"I wish she'd called me," says Maya softly, and they embrace, and in the man's hand Jon sees a book covered in soil and roots as though it had been half-swallowed by grass when he was digging it up.

He doesn't need to read the title; sometimes when he has nightmares, as he quite often does, he sees the illustration from the front cover coming closer and closer and closer to him with that horrible cartoonish grin underneath its mandibles. He sees that boy wrapped all in web, mouthing  _ help me!,  _ and he does nothing.

"A kid's book, this time," says Colin Sims, handing the thing to his wife. "Back on the pile?"

"I'll make you a cuppa, if you want," Maya stands on her tiptoes to kiss him, but then Jon always did take after his mother in looks, in height, in almost all ways. He had his fathers eyes, his grandmother used to tell him, very dark and serious, as though he were reading your thoughts.

He follows his mother and where his feet press, grass doesn't dent, dust isn't raised, bugs don't startle and scatter.

Jon doesn't notice.

Inside his grandmother's house the place is a mess, even more than it was when he was called back from uni to sort out her estate. There are boxes everywhere with labels like  _ kitchen - misc  _ and  _ living room - lamps,  _ and everywhere that isn't a box is an item: a lampshade, a knife-block without any knives, a writhing nest of plugs and cords, a DVD player with the mouth removed, a stack of VHS tapes with labels like  _ EastEnders Sunday 12th  _ and  _ DO NOT TAPE OVER WIZARD OF OZ.  _ He remembers watching that one. He used to sit on her lap, back when he was small enough to still be indulged about that sort of thing, and she would hold his fat wrists in her hands and make him dance to the beat of the songs and he would giggle because he couldn't speak all that well yet. She had the singing voice of most old women, high and reedy and clear, and she used to love singing to him. Her and his mother would sing together and his father would watch and say  _ aren't we lucky, Jonathan? Aren't we lucky? _

Jon has to touch his face to realise he's crying.

Maya takes the horrible book and sets it on a heap of others similarly covered in dirt and pale white roots on the kitchen table. She moves to put the kettle on, but Jon moves towards the heap.

Titles - things he  _ knows  _ are true -

But buried in his grandmother's garden?

There's the book he remembers from childhood, of course, and a few books in red he remembers from various statements he never got around to recording. There's  _ Dig.  _ There's that book about the plague, that one about the hospital, that one Jon only remembers vaguely but knows gave him a sticky feeling in the back of his eyes. All are plastered in soil and ground, but none of them look too worse the wear for it -

And there is a blue-cloth book there, too. The title is simple. Plain.

_ On The Nature of Sin. _

"Martin," Jon whispers, because if his parents are here - if his parents aren't dead - then perhaps Martin  _ is.  _ Perhaps that is what this book does. Gives and takes for the End, or traps him for the Lonely, or, or, or -

"Martin," he says again, and he backs out of the ghost of the house he grew up in, away from his parents drinking coffee in the garden when they should be buried in the little graveyard just out of Bournemouth proper, and, "Martin," he says, and when he tries to get into the first taxi he sees his hand passes right through the door handle as though  _ he's _ the one that isn't real.

His parents are digging up Leitners in the garden. His grandmother was wise enough to bury them where nobody would be tempted, but not wise enough to avoid dying, and what goes around has a habit of coming around, too. 

Oh, god.

He finds him eventually, because of course he finds him. Martin once said in those long weeks trekking across the hell that England had become that he thought maybe he and Jon couldn’t lose each other anymore, like they were tied together somewhere in the centre. Somewhere where it counted. 

Jon looks for days and possibly weeks. He gets hungry now he’s out of the white clinging cloud, and he finds that he can touch some things - forgotten things, mostly. Pencils sharpened down to stubs, library books never checked out, sandwiches out of date sitting at the back of the shelf in the all-night filling station. They stick out like objects used to do in the old cartoons Jon remembers watching; when you’d see a new scene, and elements the characters would be interacting with were drawn with that subtle simplicity the rest of the background lacked. This is how he feeds himself in the turning world he’s now in, eating things nobody else sees, reading boring books nobody else wants to look at, walking the hundred-odd miles from Bournemouth to London and then pacing the streets every day once he gets there, peering into faces, searching in vain for Martin. 

But he finds him. 

Of course he finds him. 

At first Jon had hung around UCL, the buildings Martin was taking his classes in when this all happened - he even walked into a few English lectures and stared at the whole theatre, but Martin wasn’t there. Just a boy Jon vaguely remembers selling books to, a Trevor or a Henry or something like that. 

He goes to some of the places Martin told him he worked at, but in the back of Jon’s head he already knows where Martin will be. 

It takes him several days to work up the courage to walk down to the Magnus Institute. No, no, courage isn’t the right word; but there’s a horrible churning dread in his stomach, an ugly thing that whispers  _ we said we would never go back  _ and quails away from the light. Jon does not want to go down to the Institute. 

But Jon wants to see Martin more than anything - Martin is his motivation above all, sin be damned, and so he pulls himself together at the fraying edges and - and - 

Skulks down the road early one morning, slipping through the Institute doors where nobody can see him. 

The Magnus Institute is just how he remembers it from before the fire, an understated, underfunded building like one of so many half-forgotten archives to this specificity or other. A few of the letters have been peeled off the sign, but it's been like that since before Jon ever got a job there, so really it reads  _ The M gnus nst tute  _ with a sort of shadow underneath all the missing letters to indicate what should have gone before. A lovely Roman font. Jon used to think it looked very regal, very Victorian, but now of course he knows better.

He slips through the doors before anyone else gets in, too. Back in the day he used to show up for work earlier and earlier as his grip on common sense loosened and his grip on his own paranoia grew, and his staff tended to follow in his example, but apparently in the version of the Institute that exists without him this work ethic hasn't been continued. There are a few jeaned and t-shirted people scurrying around, but they have little sticking notes on their lapels or equivalent, the visitor stickers Elias used to insist the students used when they would come to visit the library. Lots of Museum Studies undergrads, a few postdocs that would come sniffing around the archive on occasion, a few baffled professors directed to the site by writings unearthed sometime in the nineteenth century. Elias  _ hated  _ them.

Jon guesses in this world Elias must still be kicking around, and that's why the students look so hunted, chasing each other around the upper levels of the Institute in the wee hours. He ignores them - not that he can do much else - and takes the familiar stairs down to the basement, down to where he  _ knows  _ Martin will be.

He knows. The Eye has not given him the knowledge, but it’s just Jon’s luck.

The door to the archive is unlocked so he can move in without much difficulty, passing the handwritten sign saying, rather pathetically,  _ please get permission before entering the archive! _

He wonders who the Archivist is in this world.

He wonders -

But, no, because the Institute is here and whole and there isn't any sign of anything at all that might be amiss. Elias is evidently still around, alive and well, and there are no stains on the roof from the CO2 incident around the Prentiss attack, no blood on the tiles from the time - from all the time, really - the door to the bathroom, right beside the door out into the corridor, isn't even broken as it had been during one of Tim and Jon's endless spats, broken and never fixed.

Hah.

He frowns at it for a second, something unplaceable and sad in his chest, before he goes to poke around in the main office room. It's down the corridor and to the left, the main archives straight ahead, but he and the rest used to spend most of their working hours in the central bullpen. His own private office was a little walled-off portion of this room, heavily soundproofed (and hadn't Jon thought to question that when he first took the job?) with a little net window into the office, the way of old seventies workplaces. The office itself is just six desks against the walls or otherwise scattered across the floor, with wooden in and out trays built onto them and quite comfy spinning chairs that would slot in beside the drawers.

Tim's had a squeaky wheel. He used to spin on it and drive Jon absolutely mad.

Three desks are empty, which means three must be taken. Jon paces over to the first one with a nervousness that shocks him even now, and reads the handwriting on the sticker plate at the front:

_ Timothy Stoker _

It hits him like a bullet to the chest. He can hardly breathe with the force of it, and he runs over to the second, and:

_ Martin Blackwood _

The rest of the desks are empty. He stands for a second, aching with regret, and kicks himself because Sasha’s disappearance was not his fault - not directly his fault, anyway - of course she would have been snatched. She was curious. She was just like Jon, but without his awful luck for survival, and so she’s not - she’s not - 

Of course. Of course, Jon, and you were stupid to think it was -

Stupid, she's gone, she's gone -

His eye, pulled as though their motion doesn't belong to him, traces over to the nameplate on the office door.  _ HEAD ARCHIVIST,  _ the black-on-gold lettering proudly declares, and then smaller and in a more delicate, more recent font:

_ SASHA JAMES. _

So when Martin finally comes into work Jon isn't in fit state to be as happy about it as he should be. He sees Martin, of course he does, but he recognises him in a cloud of grey across his vision, a sort of  _ of course there Martin is  _ instead of the overwhelming joy he wants to feel. He just feels lost.

Another death he can prove was his fault. 

And it has been weeks, or maybe months, since someone gave him a hug.

(Although time is such a malleable thing in this dead space Jon has found himself in, so perhaps it has only been seconds. He's reminded of those dreadful Narnia books he used to read as a child, obsessively, fitting himself into every wardrobe and chest and space he could find in the hope he'd be taken someplace and fussed over by dwarfs and elves and all manner of things. And then they fall out of the wardrobe just in time for tea.)

Martin looks well in the world without Jon in it. His hair is a little longer than he wears it with Jon, and not flecked with grey, although that can be chalked up to the Lonely rather than actual age. He's wearing a t-shirt Jon recognises as one of their communal shirts, and it hurts him brutally to see it on a Martin that doesn't know him.

His eyes aren't lined. He looks like he might smile a lot more than the Martin Jon wakes up to in the mornings.

"Good morning archive," Martin says to the room at large, and slings the same satchel he's always owned down beside his desk, right beside the body of Jon he can no longer see. "What are we up to today?"

Jon doesn't feel joyous. He feels sick with unplaced grief. Who is he mourning, when the sin of his birth has been undone?

"Early as ever," a voice that Jon wishes he could remember from the first time comes from the door into the office, and when he looks there she is just as she should have looked when he remembers her; Sasha James, glorious as she twinkles at Martin, all a burst of wild natural curls and dark skin and pretty fingernails and a colourful skirt that scoops at her ankles and bangles, and bracelets, and vibrancy. She is beautiful. "Good morning, Martin," she says and Jon wants to kiss her. Wants to hug her. Wants to tell her he never meant to do it. 

Wants to tell her he wished it could have been him.

But now - 

But now, of course, that's all redundant.

Sasha and Martin chat for a few wonderful minutes about nothing that matters; the temperature in the archives, which is apparently very cold for this time of year, something from Martin about a man called Jamie being home late last night, something from Sasha about a local pub that apparently isn't all it's cracked up to be, something from Martin about his mother, a commiseration from Sasha, some chat about Tim, some chat about a takeaway they all apparently got last Friday evening. Jon drinks it all in like a man starved, crouched unseen beside Martin's desk.

Of course that's when Tim decides to come into work, and Jon thinks about sin once more when he looks at him smiling the way Tim used to smile.  _ Really  _ smiling.

He used to smile with his teeth and his eyes, and his hair would be a dyed mess and he wore that thin gold chain everywhere around his wrist and Martin told Jon recently that Danny bought it for Tim, and it followed that Danny was the reason for his brittle brightness. He's dressed only loosely for work in the office as he always used to, in sharp chinos and a t-shirt for a band called  _ Avenged Witch.  _ He looks more full of life than he ever looked when he would let Jon see him. "Good morning, my dearest," he says to Sasha and kisses her on the cheek, and then, "Good morning, my other dearest," and he kisses Martin on the other cheek. Both recipients just laugh good-naturedly as though this is something normal.

(Maybe it is. Maybe Jon ruined the Archives with his neuroses and his panicky need to establish himself even if he  _ was  _ only twenty-seven with a senior position, and it rubbed off on them. Maybe under Sasha's confidence they're all acting as they should have done.)

"Let's get some  _ work  _ done. Some  _ Fears  _ watched. Eyeballs don't turn themselves, you know," Tim slides into his chair, one hand on Sasha's knee and the other on Martin's shoulder to pull himself in that squeaky chair between them. "Then maybe Jamie won't kick you from the marital nest for being such a Debbie, Martin."

Jon wasn't aware there was a final straw to fall upon the camel's back, but all the same, he can listen to no more.

He leaves the Institute unseen, haunted by the sound of laughter he wishes he could remember from the first time around, and the lightness on Martin's face and the smile in Tim's teeth, completely genuine for the first time in years.

**Scene Ten: Unlikely Places**

_ The Sin of Being Born is only one part of the trilogy, that is, the Birth, the Life, and the Death. To be born is only to start the cycle, but it is not the most important of the sins - neither are Life and Death more important than one another. Without one, neither of the two can take their part, and so without existence you are without sin and without sin you are without judgement and without judgement you cannot be punished. _

Jon sits on the steps of the fountain in Trafalgar Square. It's comforting to find that even when Martin has found someone else (Jamie, and who is Jamie) and even when Tim is still happy and even when Sasha no longer looks so terribly new and normal, Trafalgar Square is still here just as it should be. Jon's birth removed from the world hasn't meant that there's a sudden invasion of aliens or something which take the four lions and replace them with -

His imagination fails him. What's important is that they're here.

When Jon went to Oxford, which wasn't  _ really  _ all that long ago, he and Georgie used to get the train from Oxford town to Paddington, and then the Circle up to Embankment, and walk the rest of the way to Trafalgar. Georgie was in a big art kick back then, even worse than she is now (is now? Is Georgie still around, now Jon hasn't been born?) and she used to drag him around the National Gallery for hours on dates, telling him about Gaugin and Seurat and the French Resistance and what it meant to be a  _ flaneur _ . He used to listen. She was - is - really beautiful, when she's excited and she would talk and wave her hands in the air and he would think:  _ this is the woman I'm in love with. _

Of course, he was at the time. Still is, in a way.

He will always love Georgie, for being the first one. He wishes he could have thanked her.

There is a group of Spanish-speaking tourists sitting near him, surreptitiously throwing bits of their lunch to the pigeons, which makes Jon smile. A few of them have started filming, giggling amongst one another as a few birds scrap over a ripped-up piece of salami. A little toddler, three or four maybe and blonde as the sun is bright, is dipping her hand in the fountain and gasping at the coldness. There's a group of three kids in school uniform tossing coppers into the water.  _ I bet you wished you could get with Madiha. No, shut up, I did  _ not -

It all washes over him like so much shoreline.

Would he undo it if he could? The Eye, not just the birth.

Jon used to think he would in a heartbeat, but now he isn't sure.

"You don't look like you're handling this very well," says a low, familiar voice beside him, and Jon startles almost out of his skin when he realises they're talking to him. "Do you need a hand in one direction or the other? I'm  _ good  _ at crossroads, you know."

The man beside him is tall, well-built, his dark skin glowing in the watery sunlight beaming off the bronze lions they sit between, his eyes so green they all but burst out of his face. He has tattoos, Jon can't help but notice, thick black-ink lines around his wrist and up his forearms. His clothes are simple, dark colours, heavy leather boots. He's looking right at Jon. "Do you recognise me?"

And Jon realises he does. "Oliver. What are you doing here?"

"What do you think I'm doing here?"

"Talking to me."

Oliver Banks, a man Jon has only seen in scattered dreams and once as a rooted, half-man half-growth, in the middle of his tree at the end of the world, smiles. "I am talking to you. I enjoy my talks with you, Archivist. I'm very rarely so engaged as I am with you."

"I'll take that as a compliment," Jon says, rougher than he means to sound. "I'm... glad to see you."

"I would be, if I had gone so long here without seeing me. How long has it been?"

"I don't know."

"It's been hardly a minute in the world you were born in, but that doesn't exist anymore," Oliver says. His nails have been painted a very pale, seawater green, and they're the only splash of colour Jon can see but for the eyes; they're chipped just a little bit, around the edges, the way Jon's nail polish sometimes chips when he paints them and worries at the lacquer with the edge of his tooth. The eyes or the nails? He isn’t sure which. "Does that make you angry?"

"I don't know," Jon says again. He doesn't know.

Oliver stretches his legs out, and Jon follows suit, but Oliver has easily a foot on him. Maybe more. His boots have a thick rubber platform on them, rimmed with yellow thread and the yellow tongue poking from the back. "And I suppose you want me to tell you what you should feel, then. Or what you should pick. It's what I did last time."

"Last time-" Jon hates thinking about this as something which comes in  _ times,  _ as something which has the potential to happen again and again and again and never stop just because he was unlucky enough to take a job when his pride was stroked the right way. "Last time was different. You never told me what to pick, anyway, you-"

"Of course I did. I gave you two options - you could have died, or you could have lived, and I decorated the second one in saving the world and having your big handsome man beside you," Oliver says this last phrase with a twist of his mouth, but he says nothing more about Martin, and Jon is grateful for it. He doesn't think he could cope with that.

Instead he just rubs at his elbow. "And are you going to do the same for me again? I can die or go back to my - to my friends?"

"Jon," Oliver looks at him with nothing but pity, "You read a book and removed the sin of yourself. I can't wave my hand and have this magically undone."

"Then what do I  _ do?" _

"Do? What is there to do? The End gets us all, in the end, if you'll forgive us. We don’t mind."

Jon glares. "No, I don't think I will."

"Regardless. You're in the  _ End.  _ That is very much antithetical to our being. You're undone," Oliver says, not unsympathetically.

"So why are you  _ here?  _ What's the point in coming to make fun of me here, apart from making fun of me?" Jon is very tired. He wants to go home, but of course he can't go home, because Martin doesn't know who he is anymore and nowhere is really home without Martin in it.

Oliver shrugs. "I'm here to help you _choose,_ Archivist. You can come with me, or you can bounce around the End and see if anyone can - see you. _Hunt_ around, if you will." His eyes are wide and they bore into Jon, as though willing him to understand. _"See_ what you can. You might find an answer in... flowers. I know I often do."

Jon looks back at him in complete bafflement. "Oliver, what-"

"I can't say anything more to you. My patron wishes you would join us, of course, but I-" and Oliver stands and offers Jon his hand, warm and strong, and Jon takes it, "-I have an interest in you. Call it personal. A little note from Antonio."

"Oliver-"

"I need to go. Come and find me if you decide to take the road less travelled," Oliver bends down suddenly, before Jon can move away, and kisses him solemnly on the forehead. It feels very ceremonial. "I trust we will be seeing each other. Good - goodbye, Archivist."

_ What? _

Jon is not a stupid man.

Jon is not, not, not a stupid man.

But Jon  _ is  _ a tired man, and so it takes him almost an hour (he wanders into the National Gallery, and is standing in front of  _ The Parting of Hero and Leander  _ for most of that time) before he realises what Oliver was trying his hardest to tell him, what Jon was being too much of a brick to understand.

Jon always used to get ridiculously upset when Georgie would tug him through the Turner room of the National Gallery.  _ The Fighting Temeraire  _ would make him sad, stupidly, incredibly sad, but he always used to linger on  _ Hero and Leander  _ long after Georgie's own interest had dried and she wanted to head towards the Post-Impressionists. It's the light, Jon thinks, and the way he could never really get a grip on what Hero's face really looked like, nevermind Leander drowning in the sea. The light, all on Hero. He used to wonder if Leander was lonely when he died, and if Hero knew she was too late to make any difference to him.

See what you can hunt, and find the answer in the flowers.

Hunt, See, Flowers. Daisy and Basira.

For someone connected to the fear of knowledge, Jon thinks bitterly, he really can be obtuse.

But doesn't it make sense, that Basira might be able to see him? If anyone could (apart from Oliver, and Jon knows he's in his landscape now) it would be Basira, herself as much an avatar of the Eye as he ever was.

A little note from Antonio.

Jon smiles at Leander, drowning in the sea as he has done for a hundred and fifty years and as he will do for as long as the oil stays on the canvas, and then he leaves the gallery unseen. He doesn't think about Martin.

(He thinks about Martin as he always does.)

(He'll never not be thinking about Martin.)

But now, for the first time, he has something to do beyond moping around various people who are happier without him in the world. But now for the first time, he has someone to find who might actually be missing him.

And he doesn't trust Oliver.

Of course he doesn't trust Oliver.

All he wants, and all he'll  _ get,  _ is waking up beside Martin again in the warmth of the world after everything they've done, and he has no choice but to believe he'll get it. 

**Scene Eleven: And So It Goes**

When he looks in the bathroom mirror, toothbrush hanging out of his mouth and his eyes still half-closed and dreaming, his reflection makes a face at him. It isn’t a very nice face. It’s twisted up and frightened, genuinely frightened, and Martin has only ever seen his face do that when he wakes up in the middle of the night and sees himself reflected in the dark window beside their bed, terrified of some nameless horror that’s chased away by waking hours. 

He blinks, and his reflection smooths out once more, and he is Martin again. 

Weird. 

“I’m going to work,” he says to Jamie, who’s sitting at the kitchen table nursing a cup of coffee and scrolling through his phone in dark mode. Jamie works in an independent speech therapy clinic, and calls his own hours, so on Tuesday mornings he isn’t actually in until eleven. Still, he wakes up with Martin because Martin wants the company, and he never makes Martin feel bad about needing someone to be awake with him when the dreams still hang on his shoulders like a heavy, burdensome cloak. 

“Enjoy it,” Jamie says measuredly, tipping his cheek to the side for a kiss Martin is glad to give him, “I love you. Do you want me to get milk after work, or will you?”

“I’ll do it, just remind me before,” Martin says. 

“I will,” Jamie kisses him in return, and doesn’t say  _ get milk after work  _ because he’s never made that joke before and there’s no reason he should. All the same there’s a sore moment where Martin waits for it and feels overbalanced when it doesn’t come, and why is that? He never had any reason to have it before. 

Wrongness chases him all the way to the Institute. 

His mother rings him just as he’s getting off the Tube, and discusses how lonely she is these days. Martin feels heavy with guilt and for a horrific moment he thinks he might be about to cry right there on the street, but he pulls himself together right at the last minute because he is a grown man in his mid-thirties and grown men in their mid-thirties don’t cry because their mother is a lonely old woman and they aren’t doing enough to help her. He looks in the window of a Caffe Nero as he’s walking, and again his face pulls a  _ face  _ at him, mouth open in a wordless, sincere scream. 

He must be seeing things. 

He must be. 

And even this morning he’d been surprised at how tall Jamie had been, as though that’s anything new, and he had kept expecting to have to bend down to kiss him, and he had been startled by the colour shade of the concealer Jamie keeps in the bathroom for his smattering of stress-acne he wants to cover up. It isn’t as though Jamie’s ever been anything but white, or been called anything but Jamie. 

Sasha and Tim are already in the archives when Martin eventually makes it down there, bickering in quiet voices about the Everchase, which is something Martin is sick to death of hearing about. He’s been working here long enough for the entities, for the Fears, to no longer shock him when people talk about them as though they’re real, but he still prefers filing and typing and  _ archiving  _ to what Sasha treats her job as, which is to be the Indiana Jones of cultists, even if she has to fumble along the way. There hasn’t been an Everchase in years, decades, and the followers of the Hunt aren’t nearly organised enough to have one anytime soon. “Good morning, Martin,” Sasha says cheerily to him as he slumps into her chair. “Wrong side of bed?”

“You could say that,” Martin presses a hand to his cheek. “I feel really weird. Hey, what do you think it is if my reflection keeps making faces at me?”

“A bad acid trip,” Tim offers from his desk. His hair has been dyed vibrant purple, and Martin can see discoloured patches of skin at the base of his neck where he hasn’t rubbed them out properly. He wants to wet a napkin and rub them off.  _ Spit!  _ That’s his mother talking through him, so - 

No, he doesn’t. Stupid, Martin, stupid.

“You haven’t been around the Stranger or anything, recently?”

“No more than any of you two,” Martin says. “I’m positive.”

“Huh,” Sasha wrinkles her nose up, but Martin’s known her long enough to tell curiosity from empathy - not that Sasha’s particularly good at comforting back-pats in the first place. People have always been second place to strangeness, in her mind. “That’s really weird. Will you tell me if it gets worse?”

_ “Worse?”  _

“More frequent, I mean.”

“Guinea-pig Blackwood, that’s what they called me in school,” Martin says gloomily. “Sure, I’ll tell you.”

He just feels weird. He feels as though there’s something he’s missing, that awful sensation when you’ve left at home something vital to your day and you know it but you haven’t quite realised what it is yet. He wishes he’d remember it so he can move the fuck on and stop shying away from Jamie every time he goes in for the embrace, because it’s getting concerning. 

Everchase. Work. Magnus.  _ Statement of…  _

Martin puts his head down, which he’s always been good at, and gets on with things. 

He’s always been good at that, too. 

At three, or a little after it, Jamie texts Martin with a shopping list, and Martin locks his phone on the chat so he won’t forget. Sasha has been up with Elias in his office for almost an hour, and Martin and Tim have begun shooting their suspect glances at each other; of course, Elias hasn’t got the power to do anything to Sasha  _ really,  _ not when she knows and Knows more than Gertrude ever did, but he can still be annoying. A lot less than he used to be, when he still had the normal amount of eyes and limbs, but annoying nonetheless.

“I’m buying you a drink,” Tim tells Sasha, when eventually she descends the stairs back to their office, rubbing the back of her neck grimly. “You coming?”

“I think you’ll march me,” she says. Perches on the edge of his desk. “Elias says something’s  _ happened,  _ with the End. Something big. I squeezed it out of him eventually.”

“Something big happening with the End,” Martin repeats, perching his chin on his bunched fist. “What, like a ritual? I thought the End didn’t do things like that.”

“It doesn’t, no.  _ The Coming End that Waits for all and Cannot be Ignored,”  _ Sasha intones, voice like a heavy tombstone slamming into place, “They shouldn’t need a ritual because everybody dies - or thwarts, I suppose, but even that is in service to the End in some way. No, it’s something else. Elias says it’s bigger than a ritual. It involves… he mentioned the Lonely. But he also said the other Lukases have no idea what’s going on, and Elias would know - and that’s the thing. Neither I nor Elias can see what’s happening. We tried. I made him try.”

That, at least, is a benign explanation for how tired and shaken she looks. Making Elias do anything, even in the state he’s in, is a difficult sort of game to play.

“I’ll keep my ear to the ground,” Tim says sincerely, taking one of her hands in both of his. “Sasha…”

Martin feels like he shouldn’t be looking. Tim has a way of making you private, of holding your hand and becoming the only one in the world.

_ “I’m  _ okay,” Sasha folds her thumb around Tim’s hands, and looks very intently at them both. “But something’s going on. Something’s going on. I don’t...”

Tim takes her to the pub and he holds her hand and helps her wriggle into her coat, too. Martin stands there, being reliable.

As he’s walking home, Martin studiously avoids shop windows and mirrors, but he still sees himself a few times in the reflection of car windscreens, in the black screen of his switched-off phone before he opens it again to remind himself of the stuff Jamie wants him to get. The other-Martin looking out at him, anguished and silent, looks pretty different to him. His hair is a little longer and he seems to be going grey at the temples - not, in his defence, an aged sort of grey, but a light smattering of discoloured hair in between the blonde. He has a few more worry lines around his eyes, and a scar on his chin that Martin doesn’t. He’s wearing different clothes. Not  _ too  _ different, not something Martin would never wear, but things he probably wouldn’t go outdoors in. A t-shirt that looks a little too tight. A hoodie with - is that the UCL logo on the breast? 

Martin makes eye contact with his other self a little too often, and again he thinks about the look on Sasha’s face when she’d talked about the End, about not being able to see. 

And in the air, although it’s been an uncommonly dry and sunny time of year, he can smell the wet electric scent of an oncoming storm.

**Scene Twelve: Unlikelier**

Jon has started spending more and more of his time in the National Gallery. He finds it amazingly comforting to be amongst the Turner paintings in particular, covered in that fog that means nothing is distinct, nothing is solid, nothing is real but the knowledge that there is  _ something  _ out there and maybe it is something alive - he sits for hours in front of  _ The Fighting Temeraire. _

Martin made him watch the new James Bond films, one night a year ago. They had film nights.

Have film nights.

Have.

Martin used to go to the CEX beside the Post Office on Camden High Street, on his way home from class on a Wednesday evening. The downstairs was all the gaming stuff,  _ is  _ all the gaming stuff, and the old TVs and the Nintendo games and the kiddie cartoons, and the upstairs is all the DVDs people don't want anymore because nobody watches DVDs. Martin used to get the ones for fifty pence, one a week, and he came home one day with  _ Casino Royale  _ and he said: "Jon, have you ever even seen an action film?"

Jon had been curled up on the sofa, half-asleep with  _ The Pickwick Papers  _ hanging between his loose fingers, his cane leaning against his leg. "I've seen  _ Tom and Jerry,"  _ he'd told Martin sleepily, and Martin had laughed and laughed and laughed.

Had kissed him on the forehead. "I love you, you know. I bought some popcorn. We're gonna watch an action film and I'm gonna make you enjoy it."

Jon had fallen asleep halfway through the poker game, and he woke up halfway to bed, Martin carrying him with only a little bit of difficulty. Martin goes to the gym two days a week. He works out there with a girl called Sara, who apparently is employed by the gym to bully people into quitting, but Martin likes it well enough. Present tense.

So he sits in front of _The Fighting Temeraire_ and thinks about James Bond and Martin and Oliver Banks and Basira, and then he stands up and grips the painting by the edges of its frame. He touches it, too - his hand doesn't go through the wood.

(Maybe it's because his birth has no affect on it. Turner sat down and painted it one day, heedless of Jonathan Sims born - or not - in Bournemouth one drizzly November evening.)

Where could he find Basira?

Should he even trust Oliver?

Somehow, he does. Oliver has always been kind to him, and kind to others - or, at least, not actively cruel to others, the way he knows it's easy to become when an entity swallows you so wholly as he and Oliver and Jude and Helen and Michael and John and Mike and -

And. And yet Oliver is kind, and his eyes are very sad and he knows that everyone will die someday, and that's something even Jon has never really been able to Know. Not really. 

Where would Basira be if she had never met Jon?

And then he remembers Daisy and when he looks at the painting again, the sunset looks an awful lot like blood.

He finds them at a house near Brentford. He didn't even have to look very hard - he just had to close his eyes, and find that thin, trembling connection he finds he still has to the Beholding, and  _ pull  _ until it gave him what he needed to know.

After that it was a simple case of following the screams.

His leg is starting to bother him again, and his hand, and he finds he has to stop near fountains and dip his arm in there; sit by park benches with his leg stretched out in front of him, massaging the muscles up beside his hip. Martin used to do this. He would say  _ Jon does it hurt  _ and Jon would say  _ no of course not  _ and Martin would say  _ give me your foot  _ and Jon would and Martin would press his firm fingers into the broken meat of Jon's leg until the aching released itself for a moment or two.

He would kiss Jon's knee, and lean his forehead against it, and he would tell Jon he loved him.

Martin always told Jon he loved him, and Jon never thought to question it.

But if Martin is  _ truly  _ better off in the world where Jon was never born - in the world where he never met Jon, in the world where Sasha was eaten by the Eye instead of Jon, where Sasha became a better Archivist than he ever hoped to be -

Basira and Daisy show up in an unmarked car. Jon only knows it's a police car by the sheen on the windows, the distinct look of bulletproof glass, like oil on clear water. He'd know them anywhere, though.

(The house is a classic open-and-shut Slaughter possession. The girl, Jon knows without having to investigate, went to London City, was in her second year, and she was getting wound up and up and up; she was getting thirds in her essays, but she knew. She  _ knew  _ she should have been a first student. She knew. She would show them all. And one day they sat down to dinner. Steak and chips, and peas from M&S, and peppered sauce in a little tub the way they sell it at Tescos, and her mum had asked her how school was going. Her  _ stupid bitch  _ mother. It was all her fault. She was never there growing up. She bought me dresses and she wanted me to be friends with my cousin, and she never encouraged me, and she told me to drop GCSE French. I'll show her. I'll show her. My fat fucking dad, big useless prick, sweat all on his forehead telling me to put down the knife. I'll show him. I'll show them all I'll write it on the walls and my pen will be the esophagus because I always did well in A-Level Biology and when I dissected that frog I felt something in me I only ever felt when I let Bryan put his hand up my skirt in the back of his car after formal and-)

And so Basira and Daisy show up in an unmarked car while Jon is eating.

His leg feels better after he's full, but his head does not. No matter what Helen used to say (although now the avatar of the Spiral is Michael once more), he will not feel good about the things he does to be full.

Basira looks as she did when he met her. Her hijab is grey and it matches her uniform; her face is set and solemn, and her lips are twisted in a particularly unamused expression. Her uniform is one of those 'along the right lines' sorts, and looks more like a police costume than anything official; the shirt and vest over blue bleached jeans, and tall Doc Marten boots that would look more at home on Georgie than on the Basira he knows.

Daisy looks -

Jon blanches at the sight of her. He remembers Daisy before the Buried, of course, in a vague way, but he hasn't ever had call to  _ really  _ remember her. Remember her like this. Her hair was very long before she asked Jon to cut it (I can't stand the weight Jon please) and now she's tied it in a bun behind her head, severe blonde and tugged so tight at her forehead that he can see the tension lines in her skin. Her eyes are hard. The Daisy Jon knows wears an eclectic mixture of skirts and dyed shirts and one-shoulder jumpers and things bought from charity shops so hipster that even the hipsters haven't got to them yet; she is a joy of colour and sight and movement.

This Daisy is tight. She's tied herself in knots with the real of her somewhere in the centre.

She doesn't look anything like herself, and Jon's heart aches with missing them all. What has he  _ done?  _

“Section 31,” Basira says brusquely to the local police who have gathered by the door; she shows some of them a badge, or something folded into a black leather wallet, and whatever it is must be effective enough that they all jump to the side and allow her through. Daisy follows - silent, lean, and viciously menacing. 

And Jon follows after that, unheeded. 

(He has been thinking about Sasha, these past few days since Oliver’s message. Sasha, the Archivist. Is she better at it than him? Does she serve the Eye well? Does she record statements - does she follow people in her off hours, stealing the stories from their mouths?)

(Is Daisy happier, here, several years into her manifestation of the Hunt? Is she happier as - not a thwarted avatar, not someone halted in potential, but someone who serves her god?)

(Basira seemed so peaceful in the bookshop.)

(Jon had really loved her.) 

_ (Present tense.) _

“Basira,” Daisy says, when they’ve been left alone in the bloodsoaked kitchen, “There’s a man following us. He’s in the door.”

Jon has never called himself a brave person; he’s always subscribed to the  _ why don’t they just run away  _ school of watching horror films, and in every terrible situation he’s found himself, he’s either been hiding behind someone bigger and stronger than him, or has been physically cornered so he can’t actually escape. 

But Daisy is very, very fast. She reaches out and snatches his shirt collar and holds him several inches off the floor, waving him side to side in front of Basira. Under closer inspection, though, Jon sees she isn’t actually looking at him - she’s looking at roughly where his face might be, but her eyes are focused on something through his head, like she still can’t see him. “Present for you, ‘Sira.”

Basira, however, looks directly at Jon. 

She doesn’t look kind. 

“I can’t see him,” Daisy says slightly unnecessarily. Jon’s collar is starting to really press into his neck, and he pulls the hand without the burn between his neck and the shirt fabric, giving him a little leeway to breathe into. He knows Daisy is strong in the world he’s left behind, but this is a Daisy he has never met before, a Daisy just one shade away from the beast. He knows she could kill him just like this. 

“What are you,” Basira says to Jon, and her eyes bore directly into his, and they are green. 

“Oh, fucking hell,” Jon says. 

_ "What are you,"  _ Basira says again, her hands now on her hips, her eyes blazing brightly and greenly and Jon can see it blinking behind her pupils, "And talk fast, mystery man. I'm busy. So is Daisy. What. Are. You."

"Archivist!" Jon yelps, Daisy's grip making his voice light and scratchy and embarrassingly high. "I'm the Archivist!"

"No, you're not. I've met the Archivist and she's not so..." Basira makes a show of looking him up and down, like she has to work to be threatening, but from Jon's position she's making an excellent job of being threatening all on her own, "She's not so  _ squeaky.  _ So try again, and make it better this time. I have work to do."

"I'm - listen, can you please put me down?"

"She won't do that," Basira says without looking at Daisy, and that's cruelty that Jon's Basira doesn't have in her, "Daisy - keep holding him up until I say."

Daisy shrugs, and Jon claws at his throat again. "Basira-"

"How do you know my name," Basira hisses, and there's a crackling feeling in the back of Jon's brain like something is being scrumpled up there, like someone is leaning pressure on his mind, like someone is saying  _ go on. Just tell her. Just tell her the truth. Just tell her. Just tell her. Just tell her the truth. _

Jon recognises the voice, because of course he does, because the voice is his own. The Beholding never uses something new when something borrowed will almost certainly do. "I know you because you're one of my... best... friends," he says, labouring under effort to keep the words in, escaping without his permission, the Beholding flattening his stammer from his voice as it always does, "You're... Basira Hussain... you're thirty-four years old... we run a bookshop together on the edge of the Lonely... you serve the Beholding-"

At this last one Basira snaps something wordless and angry, and Daisy drops Jon and puts her boot on his stomach as though there is  _ any  _ chance he's in fit state to get up and run away. His leg hurts. "None of that is true," Basira says, breathing deep and rhythmically. "You're lying to me."

"You know I can't lie," Jon says, and he wonders if Daisy could see him - if Daisy would recognise her handiwork from a previous life on his neck. "You know I'm not lying."

And Basira, miraculously, looks disconcerted. "I-"

"I'm the  _ Archivist,"  _ Jon stresses and lies on his own compulsion for all he's worth, and he has always been more powerful than Basira, always more tightly tied to the Eye, "My name is Jonathan Sims and I am the Archivist and at the moment, Basira, you're the only person I can trust. You're the only person that can see me."

Basira's eyes flicker from Daisy to Jon and back again. "And you've already been to the Archives?"

"I've been there, but Sasha won't see me," Jon says. He thinks about how he left her behind. He thinks about how she never knew him as the Archivist he became. He thinks about -

"But I  _ will  _ see you."

"I need help," Jon says, and he puts the truth in it for her to hear, as he knows she will. 

"Sit," Basira says, "Stay."

They have taken him back to a flat that Jon has difficulty believing either of them live in; the fridge is switched off and has a shopping list pinned to it in a feminine handwriting distinctly unfamiliar to either women, and there are stacks of dusty medical textbooks everywhere. They're near Highgate, because neither Basira nor Daisy had bothered to cover his eyes in any way, but he assumes that  _ being only one person in the world can see or interact with  _ isn't a particularly big security threat. The flat looks like a pretty passable facsimile of a medical student place, and Jon even sees passes for the Royal Free Hospital on the countertop beside the kettle, a few letters about missed classes on the teaching side of the place. Did Daisy put this together, or have they just broken into a house where the resident is currently out?

(Jon's Daisy once showed him her map of safehouses across mainland Britain. There was even one in Ireland, just north of the Irish border in someplace called Blacklion, although Daisy had told him she didn't use it much at all. All in all there must have been fifteen little spots splattered across the map, most of them in London, and Jon can only imagine what a comfort it must be to have a safety net that strong. That - tight.)

"Sit," Basira says again, when Jon doesn't move, "Or I  _ swear  _ I'll bring you to the Institute."

"Sasha can't see me."

"I didn't mean the Archivist," Basira raises her eyebrow and Jon realises with a start that of  _ course  _ Elias still lives in this world. Who else would have killed him? They all tried, of course they all tried, but in the end it had to be Jon.

_ Look what you did to me, _ Jon remembers saying in a thousand voices he stole without wanting to,  _ look what you did to me, Jonah, and See. _

Elias had burned. Jonah had burned.

Martin had held Jon long into the night, and Jon had cried himself dry of all the mourning he'd been keeping inside him, all the things he hadn't wanted to have to feel. All the regret. All the suffering. All the vengeance he wanted to take on Elias, burnt out now without anywhere to go.

Jon sits.

"Explain," Basira sits opposite him, balancing on a chair with her hands hugging the back; Daisy still has an unseen, unfailing grip on his shoulder, as if there's a single chance in hell Jon will risk his neck and make for the door.

Jon takes a deep breath, and wishes this was his Daisy; Martin might be the thing keeping him tied to the rest of the world, but he always used to look to Daisy for comfort, for strength, as though he could store his courage in another person. He decides to begin in the way that might best win Basira over to him: "It was Jurgen Leitner's fault, really."

Basira just blinks.

Okay, maybe not.

"I found a book in our shop.  _ On The Nature of Sin.  _ I shouldn't have - I should have waited and asked you, or - or done something, at least, but I - I was always. I did stupid things. You used to hate when I'd rush in without waiting for you."

Still, nothing.

"And I - do you know Martin? I don't know how long he's worked at the Institute, but I guess... I guess even without me he's - you know. He's still himself. He's still got lots for Elias to feed on. You know, the way he does. And I see - I know you're part of the Beholding, but you're not... do you work for the Institute? I - my Basira did, for a while, but then my  _ everyone  _ did. I used to be the - the Archivist."

Nothing.

Jon gives up.

"Your name is Basira Hussain, your favourite colour is dandelion-yellow but you tell everyone it's grey, you fell in love with Alice Tonner one year into your partnership and three weeks after you signed your first Section 31 when she killed an avatar of the Flesh for you in South Wales, you love reading poetry anthologies, your favourite book is  _ Dune  _ because you like the worldbuilding but you'll never admit it, your favourite food is Greek and you don't want to get married ever but you know Daisy does and it's your biggest fear." Jon leaves the crackling Beholding out of his voice, and doesn't change his tone even when Basira starts leaning forward, her face the very picture of hatred. "You know I didn't know that. I didn't... Behold that. You told me that, Basira, because you're my best friend except - except Jurgen Leitner - except. I read the fucking book. I read the  _ fucking  _ book and now I've never existed. I've undone the sin of my own birth."

"Daisy," Basira growls, "Can you give me a minute. And the handcuffs, please."

Daisy releases his shoulder and hands Basira a pair of clinking metallic cuffs; Basira attaches Jon's wrist to the arm of the kitchen chair he's sat in, although really he's in no fit state to go anywhere fast regardless of how he's tethered.

He doesn't tell her that. He doesn't think she'd appreciate it.

"Other hand, please," he says in a half-whisper when she goes to take the wrist of the hand he once touched Jude Perry with. It doesn't hurt to be touched anymore, but it's clawed and stiff even  _ without  _ being restrained for however long Basira will deem it necessary.

She pauses for a very long while, and then takes his other hand. "No ring."

"No," he agrees, and says nothing more.

(Martin had asked him once, when Jon had woken him up from a particularly horrible night terror, if he wanted to get married.  _ I would if you asked me,  _ he had said, particularly serious with the wet on his cheeks still not dry,  _ you know I would. _

And Jon had said  _ I know you would. But only if I asked you. And that's why I don't want to. _

And Martin had smiled in relief and had got up to make a pot of green tea and Jon had gathered the duvet around his shoulders and told Martin he loved him more than anyone had ever loved anyone else and Martin had called him an idiot and both of those things had been true.)

"I have met Martin Blackwood," Basira says, when Jon has been cuffed by his good wrist to the chair - she hops now onto the dusty kitchen table and sits, swinging her legs. Her eyes have faded back to the brown she was born with. "He didn't seem particularly special."

"He's my -" Jon stops, because he rarely these days has to introduce Martin to  _ anyone;  _ in the little world in which they operate, everyone now knows about the retired Archivist and the man who escaped the Lonely. "He's my Martin. We... we. I guess we stopped the end of the world from happening."

"The world hasn't ended."

Jon smiles, but he doesn't think he does a good job of it. "One thing that was prevented with my - with the undoing of my birth, I suppose."

"This isn't actually helping convince me you  _ should  _ have been born in the first place."

"That's not what I'm trying to tell you."

"Look," Basira says, "Say I believe you. You certainly... look like an Archivist. But I know Sasha still exists, or I would have heard about it. So why exactly come to me?"

"I was... advised," Jon shrugs as best he can, although it makes the cuff slip and bite into the inside of his wrist, "I think... well, I don't know. It boils down to me not knowing. I either want to... want to move on completely, or - or see him. Just. Just one last time. I think... I don't know if I should undo whatever it was I did, but I want to... I want to destroy the book, at least. And it must still exist. Leitner happened long before anything I might have done. I - I-"

"So you came to me to find an antique book, then?" Basira says bluntly. "No offence, Archivist-"

"Jon-"

"Archivist, but I have better things to be doing. Your beloved Archives have been in contact with the Sectioned officers, and apparently the End is stirring - the End is  _ stirring.  _ Avatars all over the place. Some podcast host or something, came to us last week because she keeps knowing how people died. I have  _ shit to do,  _ and you are not high on my priority list."

"Podc- was her name Georgie?"

If Basira was looking at him with suspicion before, now she's treating him like a particularly disgusting piece of detritus that's become stuck to the bottom of her shoe. "And why would you think that?"

Jon almost wants to cry, and he decides at the last minute to laugh instead. "She used to be my best friend. I guess... oh, Christ. Oh, Christ. Believe me, Basira, you  _ have  _ to find that book."

"Or what?"

"I don't know. But I think... I think... the End might have bitten off more than it can chew."

She slides off the table and her boot kicks his knee on the way down. He doesn't make a sound.

"I'll keep my ear to the ground," she concedes, like it's costing her a great deal, "And I'll talk to Sasha. But don't think this means I believe you just yet."

"I wouldn't dream of it," Jon promises, but at last he's beginning to see some sense of an end at the bottom of this endless fall.

(And for what it's worth, he missed her.)

**Scene Thirteen: And Again**

_ The Sin of Life is, by its very being, more complex than the simple nature of sin in existing. Life is long and full of mistakes. Life is full of hurt that cannot be undone, pain that cannot be uninflicted, words that cannot be swallowed again. The Sin of Life is the one which all other sins can prevent. The Sin of Life is grievous.  _

**_Jon, you have sinned. Your life has been a sin. What could she have achieved without a small boy hanging onto her every word, sitting sullen in his room in the house she bought for her retirement, refusing to talk to the doctor about his long fitful silences and the bouts of deep, cruel bullying from the children on the street? What could she have done without someone so obviously broken even before he was Beheld?_ **

**_Would Colin have fallen? Would Maya have become so ill as she did without the baby to think about, to prioritise above all else?_ **

**_You ended the world, Jon. It makes no matter that you fixed it, Jon. You ended it, Jon._ **

**_Look what you did to Martin. Martin never hurt you, and you hurt him. Melanie never hurt you. Georgie never hurt you. Everything they did was for your own good._ **

**_Look what you did._ **

**Look what you did.**

**_And see how easily it is undone._ **

**** Jon listens without interruption as Basira reads from the pages of the book. “Burn it,” he says, when she’s done, and if she wants to comment on the last few paragraphs oh  _ god  _ he cannot stand to hear it. “Burn the damn book. Burn it burn it burn it burn it-”

“Daisy,” Basira says quietly, “The lighter. Please.”

Daisy holds it out, and Basira dips the whole book in a bowl of spirits she had poured out just for the occasion, and the flame flickers unburning on the corner of the cover for a good minute before Basira huffs in disgust and throws it aside. 

“It wanted to be found,” she says. “It won’t burn.”

Jon refuses to let her see how high his hopes had been hung on that option; his eyes sting, for a second, and he lifts the hand not cuffed to the chair to wipe at them. “Okay. Okay. That’s fine.”

“We need to talk to Sasha.”

“No, we-”

“Sasha is a  _ good Archivist,”  _ Basira continues as though Jon hadn’t spoken. “She’s dealt with Leitners before. She’ll know what to do.”

Hanging in the air is the implication that Jon is not, but he knew that long before Basira told him, and he doesn’t allow the old realisation to hurt him anymore. “I don’t want to be there.”

“Daisy, bring him, please.”

“I said I don’t want-” Jon’s voice wrenches off a scream as Daisy uncuffs him, twisting his arm the wrong way to pull his wrist out of the open metal claw. “I - I-” 

“I really don’t care,” Basira says. “Come on.”

Daisy, unwordless, does as she’s bidden; Jon lets himself fall into a world of familiar white-noise pain. 

_ Look what you did.  _

Well, he is looking. 

He is looking all the time. 

**Scene Fourteen: Mirror Image**

Jamie kisses him deeply and passionately and with single-minded purpose, as he always does, one hand on the back of Martin's neck and the other tracing down the buttons of Martin's shirt to his waistline, his thumb diving into the divots of each buttonhole on his way down with one goal in mind. Martin allows him to. He's never been one to take the lead on anything, one way or the other.

"Are you sure you're okay?" Jamie asks, when he gets to Martin's belt and Martin still hasn't made a sound. "Martin?"

"I'm fine," says Martin tightly, because all he can see in his mind's eye is the view he was given in a car window on the way home, his other self sobbing with his hands pressed to his cheeks, his wispy white hair falling over his forehead the way Martin's never did. But Jamie doesn't need to know about that. "Jamie, seriously, I'm okay."

But what about the other one?

Is he-

No, he's not, because he's not real.

Don't be  _ stupid,  _ Martin, she says in his head, and he tries his best not to be stupid because it can't be easy, having an idiot for an only son.

Jamie kisses him and keeps kissing him and then he's whispering something sexy (Martin thinks it's meant to be sexy) and pulling him to the sofa, and still he's touching and feeling and Martin is making noise in the appropriate moments and all the while feeling wrong. Intensely wrong. As though he's... committing a crime, or doing something he's been forbidden, which can't be because his mother said she liked Jamie last time they visited and she said if Martin  _ had  _ to be gay then at least it was with someone like him, and Martin can't think of anyone else he might be disappointing. But what would Jon think?

_ Who the fuck is Jon? _

Martin pushes Jamie away suddenly, his breaths coming now to him fast and hard and uneven, rattling around in his chest like panicked little birds having seen the oncoming buzzard. "I - no - I - I can't do this, Jamie, I can't-"

"Wait, Martin-"

"I can't, I'm sorry - I'm sorry - I'm sorry -" Martin claws him away and he can't breathe, and he can't breathe, and Jamie is just looking at him as though Martin is the one being weird right now, as though Jamie has forgotten that sometimes he just gets like this, as though Jamie has forgotten the year of his life Martin lost to the Lonely -

But -

But -

But he never  _ did  _ get stuck in the Lonely. Peter Lukas, Elias' on-again off-again husband, had come to the Institute on one of their off days and had leaned over Martin's desk and told him how beautiful he looked, and how wonderfully hungry he would feel in his world, and he had touched Martin's chin with a thumb that smelt of old tobacco and fog and he had told Martin it would be easy; Elias would never know; nobody would ever know him ever again. He could make Martin forget. Martin had been sorely, sorely tempted, he can admit that now, but Sasha had burst into the room from her office with her eyes blazing all down her face and her cheeks and around her head like the horrific halo she likes to form them in and she had told him to get out of her domain and Peter Lukas had kissed Martin on the forehead and laughed and left and Martin -

And Martin -

He hadn't gone into the Lonely. He had been given the offer, but he had declined.

So he never did get stuck in the Lonely, so why is he panicking? Why can't he breathe?

_ Who the fuck is Jon? _

"Martin, I don't understand," Jamie says plaintively, his hands folded in his lap like a child that's been told off after having been found with a hand in the biscuit tin. "You - you -"

"Please don't touch me," Martin says, and his voice comes out wet and awful. "I - I - I need to be alone. Please."

But Jamie doesn't move and Martin can see his interest, his unzipped fly, the wetness on his bottom lip, the skewed mess of his hair and he feels guilty. He always feels guilty. Martin can't do anything right, can't look right, can't have sex right, can't be in love right, can't work right, can't save Jon -

"I need to go to the bathroom," he says, tasting tears on his tongue, "I'm  _ sorry,  _ Jamie. I'm sorry. I need to go to the-"

And he gets up and sprints for the corridor as fast as he can, clutching his undone buttons together as though they will find the appropriate buttonholes and slide inwards. He opens the door with one elbow, doing up his shirt with the other, and falls into the room with the thing done up all wrong, pulling the light cord with his curled pinky, and finally,

_ Finally, _

He looks into the mirror with purpose.

Martin looks out of the mirror and when he sees himself looking back, he almost weeps. He is cold. He is so cold. "Come here," he says and Martin feels himself say it and he looks down and he is almost shocked to see he is still the Martin he remembers.

This other Martin looks  _ older.  _ His hair is white, his eyes are lined, his glasses are different, his clothes are more daring, and he's let the stubble Martin usually shaves to nothing grow out into a three-day scratchy sort of shadow. His eyes are wide and patient, and his lips are chewed and bitten, and he looks a lot... wiser than Martin feels. He reaches out his hand and puts it on the mirror, where it stops and presses, exactly like glass. "You can come in," he says, and then smiles sadly, "I can't come out, but you can come in."

Martin lifts his hand to himself and expects to find the same barrier there, the same thing holding him back, but instead his fingertips press  _ through,  _ exactly like a strong soap bubble on a summery day. The tension grows to an almost unbearable humming tremor, and then the mirror shatters all over the floor and the sink, and Martin hears Jamie shouting his name from outside the locked bathroom door.

He doesn't respond in any way. It isn’t important. He puts one knee up on the edge of the sink, although if he was thinking in any way straight he would already be panicking about his weight, about the porcelain sink versus the heavy body of a man who eats well in his thirties, about the fact that his mother bought him a gym subscription he never ever went to, about how Jamie is always bothering him to get one of those kitchen-delivery boxes, the sort that give you bell peppers already halved, and wholemeal rice. He thinks about all this in the space of half a second, and then, and then, and then,

"Oh, come on, you won't fall," says other-Martin, reaching out and putting his hands on Martin's shoulders. He pulls.

Martin does what he does best, and falls. He doesn't even make a noise.

It feels like he's falling for years and years, or maybe even for half a moment, but when he lands he lands painlessly and on his feet with an elegance he's never possessed. The world around him is in negative, like a hall of mirrors in a carnival; tall Martins, short Martins, wide Martins, thin Martins, Martins warped and wobbly and Martins angular and twisted, all with watery blue eyes looking right at him. He feels watched, and cold, and he wishes he had worn a jumper.

Other-Martin just smiles at him again, and it freaks Martin out more than any of the rest of it. "I managed to find the Spiral, you know. In this - in wherever we are, they aren't Helen. They're still Michael."

Martin met Michael a few years ago. He and Sasha are quite close, apparently, but then Sasha is renowned within their little society for befriending pretty much every avatar they have going. She goes for pink girly drinks with the fucking distortion, and they make crude jokes about Tim, and Michael sticks out three of his fingers around the handle of said fancy cocktail drinks. "Are we in the spiral right now?" Martin says, instead of any of that, and horror dawns, "Are you - wait, no. I know Michael. He - he - we have an agreement. Sasha will - Sasha will  _ ki-" _

"Sasha?" Other-Martin interrupts, his genial face turning abruptly hard and unreadable. "Do you know Sasha?"

"I know the  _ Archivist,"  _ Martin says. He's not above using his connections to get out of dangerous situations, or whatever, and if this is some new manifestation of the Spiral he doesn't particularly want to get stuck there.

"I know the Archivist too," says Other-Martin slowly. "Do you know him? Jon?"

"I don't know any Jons in the Archives, and I've worked there... oh, seven years," Martin says, as firm as he can. He will not be convinced of things he knows aren't true. "There are no Jons in the Archives."

"Jonathan Sims-"

Martin covers his ears with his hands. "Michael!" He yells, and all of the twisted, warped versions of himself mouth  _ Michael  _ with faces that look almost but not quite like himself, "Michael, put me  _ back!" _

"You know who Jon is," Other-Martin says. His voice is uneven. Wobbly. "You... know who he is. He's in the back of your mind, isn't he? You know who Jon is."

And Martin can see him, unbidden he  _ sees  _ him. A short man, a thin man, underfed. One of his hands is tucked in the pocket of a heavy wax coat; the other holds the rounded head of a cane, slim and delicate, and he's clearly leaning a lot of his weight on the thing. His hair is long and brown, threaded with grey out from the roots, and his eyes look heavy. They're as green as Sasha's become, when she's in the throes of Beholding, when she looks every inch the terrifying embodiment of knowledge she is. There is a thick, white-rope scar across his throat, and little circular scars all up one cheek and down his neck, vanishing into the collar of his t-shirt. He looks small. He looks scared.

And Martin knows his name is Jonathan Sims, and Martin knows that he is someone important.

"Please, Martin," says Other-Martin, his voice full of wet urgency, his cheeks rippling, and Martin can feel himself being pulled back towards the frame of the mirror, "Please, you have to  _ remember.  _ Please remember. Please. I know you can. I know you can.  _ I know you can..." _

"I know you can," Martin whispers. His knees are hot and soaked, and when he looks down he's kneeling in a heap of broken mirror shards, his jeans stained dark and ugly red, and Jamie is hammering on the bathroom door.

He can see the man, Jon, in his mind. Every time he blinks he sees him.

And it makes him terribly, terribly sad.

  
  


**Scene Fifteen: Unexpected Visitor**

When Jon goes back to the Archives, this time in the tow of Daisy and Basira, he finds that their arrival is not the thing that's upset the balance of calm that usually reigns over the place. (Still no sign of Elias.) As they walk down the stairs they pass three younger girls with library pass clips on their pockets, gossiping hurriedly and excitedly about YouTube and ghost shows and haunted Archives, and Jon is wondering what all that could mean - forgive him for not being quick on the uptake - when he sees the  _ Ghost Hunt UK  _ logo up on their phone screens and everything suddenly makes sense.

He had been  _ wondering  _ where Melanie was, and when she was going to show up.

Melanie King has been sleeping terribly, these past few nights, and her waking moments haven't been too fun either. These past few  _ weeks,  _ really. She thought it had to do with her breakup with Georgie, but that had been months ago, and it had been amicable enough - Melanie misses the cat more than she misses Georgie, the big fat tabby called Captain Captain, but even she can see that the relationship was a bad fit. They didn't slot together for anything longer than a day before Georgie was snapping at her for being too impulsive, too reckless, and Melanie couldn't - still can't - cope with the way Georgie tended towards the placid, the unmoving, even in situations where it just. It just wasn't right.

_ At least,  _ Melanie thinks, picking her way through the puddles on the dank London streets,  _ at least it's between us.  _ She and Georgie had been an almost-thing for as long as there had been an online British paranormal scene, but that knowledge was restricted to those in the business and those few super-fans that liked to gif Melanie's videos and livestreams, and clip Georgie's podcast and Twitch shows, and make the sort of theories that most of the rest of the fans would dismiss as space cadet nonsense.

But none of that explains why Melanie remembers a man called Jon where there wasn't one.

His name is Jon, Jon Smith or Smirke or Sims or Sill or something like that, and he is small and he has a limp and something happened to his hand and Melanie  _ knows  _ she was his friend. When she brought him up to Georgie, as Georgie was coming over to collect the last of her stuff, Georgie had just looked blank and said, "Who?"

It had really irritated Melanie at the time, because it seemed far pettier than Georgie would usually sink, and she had been short with her the whole rest of the evening, and when she had brought the incident up to Sarah - she  _ knows  _ Sarah knew Jon, she knows everyone knew Jon - Sarah had done the same.  _ Melanie,  _ she had said, with a worried smile on her face,  _ I - Melanie, you must have mixed someone up for someone else. The only John I know is my wee brother, and he's... oh, he'll be eleven next month. _

And now Melanie is losing sleep. She keeps dreaming about a man she doesn't recognise with eyes where his mouth should be, eyes where his ears should be, eyes where his nose should be, and then he looks at Melanie with a mouth that is all looking and the pupil moves and says  _ do you want to know how he died?  _ and Melanie doesn't want to know how he died and the man who is all eyes tells her anyway, and although Melanie was sitting by her father's bedside when he died, and not in the fire the man tells her about, she wakes up crying and when she touches her face she's surprised - always surprised - to see her fingers moving under her cheeks.

She sees Jon when she's doing her job, too. Breaking in places, having fights with the fucking urban explorers, trying to wrangle a little after-hours in some of the more ghoulish public attractions London has.  _ (If  _ Buzzfeed Unsolved  _ can do it, why can't we?)  _ But now when she goes anywhere, even down to  _ Bubbleology  _ for her mango tea with apple boba, she sees him. Never in person. She just sees... she can't put her finger on it, but she sees the place where he should be, in these skinny little jumpers and dark trousers, hair tied back, talking to the air, standing at the traffic lights, laughing at a joke nobody has said.

She googled it, and after some digging, and some digging, and even more digging, she got directed here.

_ The Magnus Institute. _

"They say you're the woman to come to with a problem," she says, when a tall man with a sharp grin shows her to the office of the Head Archivist. The Head Archivist is a small, dark woman with beautifully out-of-control hair and a thick, bobbly red jumper that Melanie instantly wants.

She shrugs, and smiles, and Melanie thinks about sparrowhawks. "If they say that, that's their problem," the Archivist says. "My name is Sasha James. You're Melanie."

Melanie shrugs and thinks nothing of it, because she's got enough subscribers and enough of a following and has created enough silly reaction gifs over the years that someone like Sasha recognising her isn't out of the bounds of possibility. "Sure. Listen, I'm seeing someone."

"Well done," Sasha says mildly.

"No -  _ no.  _ Not like that. I'm seeing someone that isn't there."

"In that case," Sasha begins to smile again, the way Melanie used to when she was winding Georgie up, "I would advise trying to get a new significant other. Relationships are so hard to keep going when you're a working woman."

Melanie rolls her eyes as hard as she can. "Does the name Jon mean anything to you?"

Outside, in the main office, she hears someone drop a pen pot or something; there's the sound of a million plastic things hitting the floor, and someone passionately swearing, and the man with the skew-whiff grin laughing. She ignores it. "Jon Smith, or Sims, or Sing, or something. I keep seeing him. Tiny man. Long hair. Cane. Looks a bit fucked up."

Sasha, to her credit, does look genuinely lost. "I - no. It's not ringing any bells. Are you sure you've come to the right place?"

"I don't  _ know,"  _ Melanie says, laying on the patience as thick as she can bear, "That's why I've come to you. You're meant to be a... base for all this spooky shit, aren't you? Centre of the web."

Sasha frowns uncomfortably. "I wouldn't put it like that."

"Fine, fine. But you're still... you know more about seeing people that aren't there than I do, right? So I just thought maybe you could - maybe there was a chance," Melanie deflates, "I'm going crazy. I can't sleep. When I dream I see this...  _ man.  _ And everything is eyes."

"That would be... my boss, so to speak. What he looked like before his… accident, I suppose," Sasha seems to be on firmer ground here, but Melanie can cope with the dreams; she can't cope with Jon, or whoever he is, and how unbearably sad he looks.

"Are you sure you can't-"

"Miss Sasha sir ma'am," silly-grin man shoves his head through the door, looking utterly unapologetic to have interrupted, "There's some police here to see you. About some guy called... Jon? Will I get Martin to talk to them? They seem pretty stressed."

Melanie tries her best  _ not  _ to radiate self-satisfaction, but she's pretty sure she fails.

Sasha passes a small hand over her eyes. "No, Tim, show - show them in. I... you want to be here for this, I gather," she directs this last part to Melanie, who nods. "Okay. Thank you. Tim, can you ask Martin to make... a pot of tea?"

Tim looks slightly more serious. "What's all this  _ about,  _ Sash? The End?"

"The End hasn't got a ritual," Sasha says flatly, staring at an empty patch of desk, "And you know what, Tim - I'm starting to get pretty fucking stressed about that."

  
  


**Scene Sixteen: Two Archivists**

_ Some police here to see you  _ translates to Daisy and Basira leaning against one of the empty desks, talking softly to one another about who's turn it is to cook tonight, and whether they want to get a bottle of red to go with Daisy's meal, or if Daisy will join Basira in a glass of grape cordial instead. Daisy isn't in uniform at all, but instead is wearing a soft grey jumper and holey bleach-blue jeans; her few nods to her occupation, or more likely her hobby, are the fingerless gloves with grips on the palms, and the supple leather boots that seem more moulded to her feet than most people manage in a lifetime. Basira is only nominally in the uniform of the Met, the vest and the patterned belt, but she's wearing a dark shirt and sensible, dark-red boots that definitely aren't regulation.

Jon, who has been listening in on Melanie and Sasha's conversation, hurries back to stand between the two women. Tim hasn't seen him, and he has no reason to believe either Melanie  _ or  _ Sasha will; he assumes Basira's Beholding, or perhaps the closeness with which they've worked for the past few years, is the reason she can see him at all.

Martin has also been listening in, and he looks rather the worse for wear. Jon tries to stop himself from looking, from seeing a Martin who looks  _ so different  _ without the things that have happened to him under Jon's influence - a Martin still completely blonde, a Martin without so many stress lines, a Martin who sits a little more hunched than usual and who smiles less and who seems to shake, sometimes, the way Jon's Martin did before he started his course of sertraline, before he started going to a matronly sort of therapist called Rosaline twice a month. A Martin who looks -

_ Different.  _ Jon wonders if he's happy.

"The Archivist will see you now," Tim announces, coming out of the office with a grandiose sweep of his arm. All the same, he looks anxious. "I - just give me a second," and he looks over his shoulder, and Jon can hear him offering Melanie a cup of tea and a jammy dodger from the break room.

"Don't worry about it," Basira says dryly. "We haven't got much else going on."

Although Jon's leg isn't hurting him particularly badly, he wishes he had his cane in his hand. He walked with it often, even when he didn't really  _ need  _ it, because he liked the feel of the smooth round head, the way he always had something to do with it. He finds himself leaning against desks and walls all the same, compensating for a pain, a weakness, he no longer truly feels. He wishes he had his cane now.

"This place sucks," Daisy says to Basira, not bothering to keep her voice all that low; looking around, Jon can see that Martin at least has heard her, and Tim is sending a displeased face her direction. "I feel... I'm gonna go."

"No," Basira reaches out as quick as a whip, snatching Daisy's wrist between finger and thumb. "No. Stay here. The Eye is - stay here. And I don't trust  _ this one  _ an inch," that last with an indication of her head to Jon.

Jon tries to look as trustworthy as he can, but it doesn't seem to do much for Basira. This Basira is one he had almost forgotten about, the sort of casual cruelty, the refusal to feel empathy for anyone but Daisy and even that tenuous, the short-sighted dedication to keeping those she feels are worthy of the safety - safe. She glowers at him.

"Go ahead in," Tim says after a pause. Melanie files out of the room looking down at her phone screen, and so Jon doesn't get to see if she will see him; she trails after Tim on her way to the break room, all thin and confused but still as dervish as he remembers her. Melanie never changes. But then - Jon didn't really ever have influence over her, the way he obviously has over Martin, over Basira, over Daisy. Melanie fought hard to make sure that never happened.

Daisy pulls Jon along with her at Basira's prompting, when all he does is stare after Melanie. "Come  _ on." _

Sasha is sitting in the office Jon remembers these days only in his nightmares, really.

The filing cabinets line the wall, but there is no sign of the hole in the wall Jon knows is there, the place that was knocked in during the Prentiss attack. Do the Archives know about the tunnels under them, then, or is that still a secret? Sasha keeps her desk just as badly as Jon used to, with overflowing in and out trays, and those manilla file papers and box files bulging at the seams, and a pot of pens, and ink refills - Parker and Cross and even a Montblanc cartridge or two - and the carpet covered in muddy bootprints and boxes of fax paper, and broken pen lids and the aglets from a pair of trainers and a coat and a single blue boot and a copy of the King James Bible and a book of Heaney poetry and a Welsh-Gaelic dictionary. A different sort of clutter, perhaps, but clutter nevertheless, the sort of mess that follows an Archivist around.

In the centre of it all - eye of the storm - sits Sasha. "You better have an explanation for me, detective," she says to Basira, her eyes never straying from Basira's face, so that Jon has no idea whether she can perceive him or not.

"I don't think I do," Basira says.

And Sasha's eyes are green. Jon has that film picture of her up in his and Martin's flat, of course, but it was taken by a very bad camera, and there's no chance at all of him telling what colour her eyes might have been when he really knew her. "Sasha," he says, from behind Basira, and he is very surprised indeed when she looks at him.  _ "Sasha." _

"I know you," she says slowly, with a sort of dawning realisation, "I - where do I know you from?"

"I used to be the Archivist, I suppose," Jon says. He tries to sound as nonthreatening as he can, but he isn't sure how successful that is. "I - Basira. I mean. We were all...  _ courted  _ by the Eye, I suppose, at the same time. Elias, he -"

Sasha screws up her nose. "Don't warn me about him. You're several years too late. We have him... controlled, for now, although he does tend to continually insist on ends of one world or the other being begun. Are you of the End?"

"I'm of the Eye."

"So am I," she sounds confident and she looks confident, too, an Archivist far more settled in her powers than Jon imagines he ever could be. She sits into her body like she belongs there. "You say you're of the Eye, but the Eye shows me everyone who is  _ of  _ it, and I know you're not one."

Jon winces. He never wanted the power, but it still hurts to be denied it. "No, not... maybe not in this world. But you can tell I'm telling the truth, can't you?  _ I used to be of the Eye." _

"He's telling the truth," Basira says sharply. "I - can also tell."

Sasha ignores her and speaks directly to Jon. "In this world. And that means what, exactly?"

Jon tells her as best as he can. He bets that when  _ Sasha  _ is under pressure she doesn't stutter. Her face is unblemished, and so are her arms, her shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow to show only the sort of scars you collect when you've lived past thirty, but none of supernatural origin. He bets that Sasha would shake Jude Perry's hand and come away with nothing more than a kiss that burns a little too bright on the corner of her mouth; he bets that Sasha would offer nothing to Jared Hopworth and get everything in return. He bets that Sasha knows Breekon and Hope, or whatever it is they're calling themselves in this world, and that she would turn around a second before anything descended upon her head. Jon tells Sasha everything to the best of his ability, but he doesn't miss the lack of compulsion.

Sasha trusts people to tell her the truth without using the Eye. She is either feared, as Gertrude was, or respected, as Jon wasn't.

"Leitner," Sasha says at last, when Jon has finished talking. "Of course it would be  _ fucking Jurgen Leitner." _

Daisy, although she can't see him, pulls one of the uncomfortable metal chairs from beside the door, and puts it near him. He all but falls into it, clinging to the arm with his unburned hand, sweat beading on his forehead - Sasha must notice this show, but she doesn't say anything about it one way or the other.

She's two years older than Jon, and she doesn't look it. He'd like to see  _ Sasha  _ walking with a cane, Sasha curled up on her bathroom floor because she can't remember to breathe, Sasha's hands shaking on foggy mornings, Sasha crying into the cloth of her boyfriend's t-shirt at four in the morning because when he lies still she thinks he's dead.

No. Sasha wouldn't do anything like that.

But she has always been the more obvious candidate for Archivist - no wonder the Eye dotes on her.

"Fucking Leitner," Basira agrees dryly, also completely ignoring Jon. "I thought it was the truth. So, Archivist, tell me - what do we do about this? Do we do  _ anything  _ about this?"

"The End is unhappy, I know that much," Jon says from his chair. "I was talking to Oliver Banks a little while ago, and he certainly remembers who I am, even if nobody else does."

"Oliver," Sasha taps her chin thoughtfully. "The accountant. Yes, I know him. It makes sense he would know who you are; you're functionally dead, and that means you're in his realm."

"I thought I was in the Lonely."

"No, or we'd have one of the Lukases banging on our door. As far as I know," and Sasha grins, and it isn't a funny smile, "And I  _ would  _ know, from what we've done to Elias, the Lonely is completely unaware of this. Or at least, as aware as the rest of us. We can all feel what's happened, but none of us - until now - knew what it was. Just Oliver."

Jon surprises even himself with a laugh. "That's nothing new," he says, smiling ruefully, "Even - even. Oliver's always been the first to know about something new, and the last to know about anything else."

Sasha smiles at him. He doesn't know why, but it catches him off-guard.

"Melanie knows," he says at last, and smiles at her confusion. "Melanie is - she's a good friend, in the world where I exist. So is Basira, and Daisy, if you'll believe me."

"And me?" Sasha asks lightly.

_ She was unforgettable, Martin used to say, and sometimes Jon would wake up during the naps he managed to sneak during the day and he would smell burning hair and he would see her eyes, the wide eyes of the thing that was never Sasha, and he would want to cry.  _ "And you," he says. "Yes - yeah. We were friends."


	3. Act Three: Death

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**Scene Seventeen: Spreading Influence**

Martin can't think straight all day. He knows there is someone called Jon hidden in the office, and he knows that Sasha couldn't and now can see him; he knows that one of the policewomen - the small and frightening one - can't and still couldn't see him; and he knows he doesn't want to find out which camp he falls into, in case Martin doesn't see him.

Or worse, in case he does.

He spends twenty minutes eavesdropping, but he finds he doesn't like what he's hearing. It's hard to tell if this Jon is softly spoken, too quiet to be heard, or if Martin just can't hear him because he can't perceive him, but in between the lulls of his speech Sasha talks, and she hasn't got any problems about being as loud as she wants. Never did.

_ "Fucking Jurgen Leitner,"  _ he hears Sasha say, and the sound of the metal chair beside the door being dragged quickly over the floor.

Tim isn't even pretending, as Martin is, to do any work. He's leaning against one of the filing cabinets by the door, a brown folder labelled  _ The End The End The End  _ up in front of his eyes, but the words are upside down and all the actual paper that was once inside the file is strewn, unread, all over the top of the filing cabinet. Every time Sasha, or the other policewoman, raises her voice, Tim makes a show of pressing his ear against the thin wall, making a face at Martin, like he knows Martin is finding this a lot more sinister than he is.

To Tim, everything is a game. Martin is never sure how serious that is, or if it hides a deeper trouble, but at the moment he’s too busy keeping his own head above water to care. 

(His mum hasn’t called in a week, and neither has the home. He dialled her last night, and it rung twenty-seven times before he gave up.)

"I'm going to the loo," Martin says, pushing himself away from his desk, his chair rolling until it crashes against a few stacked box files against the wall. "I'm going to - I'm going. Want a cup of tea?"

"From the  _ loo?"  _ Tim raises an eyebrow.

Martin takes that as a no, and backs out of the main office before Tim can reel him in with any more attempts at lightheartedness.

He can hear that woman, Melanie, in the break room on the phone to someone. Jamie used to watch her videos all the time, until Martin told him a little bit more about what he actually did as work in the Institute, and Jamie stopped; he said it was too freaky, trying to be into ghosts and goblins when he knew his boyfriend was actively documenting the  _ real  _ ghosts and goblins for purposes unknown. Funny, that. Martin had always pictured Melanie King taller.  _ "I'm sorry,"  _ she's saying, down the phone,  _ "Do you want to come get it today? I thought I'd given you the last of the - no. Yeah. Yeah, of course." _

Everyone has a life outside the Archives, or at least, it seems everyone does except Martin. He goes home, and his problems follow him.

Almost like the common denominator isn't the Archives at all. Martin doesn't like thinking about that option, but his mind keeps returning to it, more and more often these days as Jamie separates himself from Martin's distance, responds to the far-off light in Martin's eyes. They hold hands in bed, sometimes, and it makes Martin feel juvenile and alone, how he felt when he was fifteen and he cut his hair for the first time, silly and childish and  _ just going through a phase. _

_ Martin had talked to Jon about his name, once, a few months after they moved into their new flat. “Martin sounds nothing like that,” Jon had said in baffled confusion, having stumbled upon Martin’s birth certificate in a mountain of music exam slips and A-Level certificates and old CVs and university prospectuses from the mid-00s, the sort of tat that’s too important to chuck out but not important enough to keep. “Why did you pick Martin?” _

_ And Martin hadn’t been able to vocalise that it was precisely that, the fact that Martin was a name so far removed from his old one that it was reinvention.  _

_ Reinvention is nothing if you just do the same thing with yourself.  _

Martin locks the door to the loo and wheezes until he has control of his breath again. Everything spirals.

He doesn’t remember that. 

He doesn’t remember that. 

Or rather, he  _ does  _ remember that, and he doesn't know why he does. Jamie doesn't even know the name Martin was born under, or at least, Martin thinks he doesn't; he doesn't involve himself with the only person in the world who might call Martin by it still, and he doesn't really use social media, so he wouldn't have found Martin there. Martin hasn't thought about that name in years. He doesn't know anyone called Jon, and he's never moved in anywhere with someone called Jon, and he - and he -

He claws at his throat again, evens out his breathing. One thing at a time. One thing at a time.

So there is someone called Jon in the office, and he is starting to remember things about his past that never happened, and even Tim is starting to look at him oddly, and Melanie King the YouTuber is in their break room talking to someone about moving boxes, and Sasha is talking to two policewomen, and something's wrong with the End, and Jamie won't look at him anymore, and his mum isn’t answering the phone. Those are all one thing, one thing and one thing adding up to make a larger thing, or maybe just a collection of miscellaneous things that Martin in his paranoia has tallied to make more than they are.

For something to do, he flushes the toilet, although he's mostly been in here having a breakdown. He can hear Tim singing in the office the way he does when he doesn't want Sasha to know he's been eavesdropping.  _ Come on Eileen.  _ Tim likes to slap the desk during the chorus. Tim once got him drunk, got him really drunk in the  _ One Joking Jester  _ bar down the street, and he and Martin sang silly country songs until they kicked them out of the bar at three in the morning.

Martin feels like his mind is escaping him, like his thoughts are usually kept in a jar, like someone has knocked the jar over and now his thoughts are scattered in puddles of disorganised memory. Who was he? Can he keep hold of that?

He needs to get a grip.  _ Get a grip, Martin. _

"Get a grip, Martin," he whispers to himself, and he unlocks the loo door with the determination of someone going to war.

He bumps shoulders with the shorter of the two policewomen, the scary blonde one with the long braid, on the way out. It's just the two of them, marching with a little space between them, but that means nothing; maybe they just have, like, very strong personal bubbles, or something. The blonde one glares at him on the way out, and her teeth seem longer, sharper than usual. Her eyes are yellow.

Martin shivers, and goes back to the main office, his spine crawling. Melanie King (viral YouTuber, what the fuck) is still having a heated phone call in the break room, but now she sounds a little softer, a little more upset.  _ Let me speak, Georgie, please. I know... I know... _

None of Martin's business. None of Martin's business.

He has to blink a few times to get rid of the blurry fog in his vision, but he puts that down to too many sleepless nights and too many horrifying dreams, recently. Maybe he needs to go back to the opticians. Maybe he needs to -

"Are you okay?" Sasha is peering at him from her seat on Tim's desk, her booted feet swinging into the heavy wood of the side of it. "Martin, if you need to go home-"

"No, I don't," he says decidedly, pulling his chair over to the empty space in the middle of the room and all but falling into it. "I don't. What's the latest? Is the world going to end? Are we all going to die again?"

Sasha looks uncomfortable, tugging on the end of one twist of hair by her cheek. "I don't... know. I think I need to... talk to some people, maybe. Some... I don't know."

Which is new. Sasha is undefeatable, unputdownable, bouncing up, full of vicious happiness no matter what crosses her path. Martin admires that about her. She has no hesitancy, no matter how dire the circumstances get; that's how they kept Elias at bay, all these years after the botched attempt at the end of the world, not-quite-killing him. "You don't know," Martin repeats, and looks at Tim, who shrugs back at him. "I - okay."

"I think I need to do some things. On my own," Sasha says, when Tim opens his mouth to offer help.

"Those police... they have agendas," Tim says, after a long and unsettling pause - Martin can't remember the last time she shut Tim down so quickly. "They have their own goals, and their own, their own - shit that they want, and Sasha - Sasha, I know you'll - I know you're smart, I  _ know  _ you are, but they're-"

"Don't try and tell me I'm being manipulated," Sasha passes a hand down her face, breathing heavily, "I know... things. I know something's not right,  _ everyone  _ does, and I'm just going to some... independents. To fact check. Tim, I promise."

Martin's head hurts. He shuffles in his office chair back to his desk, where he knows he keeps a little packet of paracetamol in a pot with some empty pens and a half-chewed packet of gum.

Neither Tim nor Sasha pay him any mind at all.

He opens the drawer without looking down and dives his hand in, scrabbling for the crinkly packet he knows is in there - but his fingers hit something hard, and larger than anything he knows is in his drawer. Surprised, he looks down.

_ On The Nature Of Sin  _ looks back up at him, a handsomely-bound book, old and well cared for, bound in simple blue linen.

Funny, that. He's never seen it before, and he has a pretty comprehensive list of sort of -  _ cursed books _ in his head, so he's never heard of it either, but something makes his hand stop just shy of the cover, his thumb hovering over the embossed title.  _ On The Nature Of Sin.  _ It sounds plenty dramatic.

"What's that, Martin?" Sasha says, after a long beat in the conversation he figures they must have been waiting on him for.

"Oh, nothing," he says, quietly shutting the drawer. "Just some... folders I thought I'd lost. But I'll sort it out later. What were you saying?"

He takes the book, though, when neither Tim nor Sasha are watching, and slides it into his satchel. He half-expects his fingers to burn off when he touches the cover, or, or, or  _ tingle  _ or something, something magical the way he's heard in the statements, but nothing happens. It's cold, and a little bit damp, but everything is cold and a little bit damp when it spends more than a few hours in the badly-kept main office, instead of in the temperature-controlled rooms deeper in the archive. The book is a little bigger than they usually are, but it fits nicely between Martin's laptop and the paperback he's been reading.  _ The Pickwick Papers.  _ It'll probably be more entertaining, too.

"I'm off," he mumbles to Sasha; Tim left half an hour ago or so, citing something he wanted to chase up with one of his friends - acquaintances - aligned with the darkness. "I'll see you tomorrow."

She looks up, dark shadows under her eyes, and offers him a tired smile. "See you tomorrow, Martin."

He smiles back as best he can, but all the same he's glad - more than he usually is - to be out of the archives and into the drizzly, cloggy air of London in the evening. Jamie texts him; Martin reads it, something about picking up milk and biscuits on the way home, but he doesn't bother replying, too busy thinking about Melanie King in the break room and the book in his bag. He feels dulled, somehow, like everything has taken a backseat to the possibility of reading this thing as soon as he gets home.

There's a little bit of Martin, the sensible bit of Martin, beating his fists against the sides of his head and telling him to be sensible - to be normal - to  _ stay away -  _

But he can't hear it, right now, and he isn't sure he wants to anyway.

**Scene Eighteen: Missed Connections**

Jon runs away from Basira and Daisy as soon as they leave the Institute, and it isn't even as difficult as he thought it would be. Daisy has his wrists clamped in one hand, her thumb against the vein there, but all he does is think about how little he exists in the world and he finds his arms passing through Daisy's grip like water, like he never was there at all, and he finds that when Basira looks at him she looks  _ through  _ him like she's having trouble focusing on him, and suddenly he's free of both sight and touch and he's running down the street, down the little hill the Institute is set on towards the Tube station at the end of the road.

"He has the book."

_ "Fuck!"  _ Jon clutches at his chest dramatically, leaning against the wall of the station beside the busker there, dolefully cranking out a cover of  _ The A Team,  _ struggling to hit the higher notes.

Oliver Banks is back, looking with some amusement at Jon catching his breath. He's in summer shades, a pale t-shirt with  _ growth  _ stitched in serif over the right breast, white cargo shorts, and immaculate white high-tops, clean in the way Jon has only ever seen them in shop windows. Against the dark of his skin, the clothes look even colder, refreshing in the hot of summer. "I said he has the book, Archivist. What are you going to do about it?"

"Who is  _ he?"  _ Jon asks, although he knows.

Of course he knows.

It could never be anyone else.

Oliver raises an eyebrow, and stands forward, offering his arm to Jon. "I'll walk you to his flat. I won't insult you by telling you his name. I trust you know."

Jon waits a second, just a moment to prove to himself that he still has agency, but then he slips his hand into the crook of Oliver's elbow and lets himself be pulled away from the wall and the awful man crooning Ed Sheeran. "How did he get the book? I thought it vanished when I read it."

"Books have a purpose," Oliver says, striding purposefully out of the Tube station, Jon scrambling slightly to keep up. They walk through people sometimes, and past people other times, but Jon gets the feeling that Oliver's relationship with conventional perception is a lot like his own, these days. "Books have a purpose, Archivist. Humour me. What are they?"

"To be read," Jon says, slightly petulantly. He doesn't enjoy being condescended to.

"And if I were a book with a... nature of my own, so to speak, I think I would try my very hardest to be read, don't you think?"

"I suppose I do."

"We know the book can change the way the world is," Oliver says. He slows down a little, perhaps having noticed how fast Jon is having to go to keep up with him, but he doesn't look down at him. "We know the book has influence over at least two of the entities, and partially more. Why shouldn't he have it?"

"I suppose," Jon allows again. "But I don't... why should it want  _ Martin?" _

Oliver looks at him then, faintly pitying, that look on him that Jon so hates, the look Oliver has when he knows he knows more about whatever's going on than anyone else in the room. "Why shouldn't it want Martin? Martin is the thing keeping you so strongly here, Archivist. Martin  _ remembers  _ you. Oh, Melanie does too, but that's just her own personal distrust for the Stranger; that aspect would never have worked on her. But Martin remembers you. The book wants to make sure what it's done can't be removed, and at the moment the biggest threat to it is Martin. You would be gone forever if not for him. Didn’t you know?"

"So you think what it's done  _ can  _ be removed, then," Jon can't help but ask, and he hates how hopeful he hears himself sound.

"I don't know," Oliver puts his hand on Jon's for a second, and then back into his pocket, "I don't know. For what it's worth, I hope it can. You have had... impact beyond what you know, in this world. Beyond what you know. I think part of the reason there are so many fragments to this is that it - it's taken on more than it can handle. It doesn't... it hadn't anticipated this. The lives you have taken and saved, the things you have changed, the people you have pulled into your sway... it's more than perhaps it thought."

"Thought?"

"Has capacity for, perhaps," Oliver corrects himself, smiling beatifically. He looks like an angel, Jon thinks, and then he thinks about Martin and for a second he is so viciously homesick he thinks he might cry.

The moment passes.

(The moment backs off, but doesn't pass. It just lies in wait until Jon will next be vulnerable, when it will hit him as hard as it can.)

"And so I think it wants to get Martin so that what it's done will be made permanent," Oliver continues, either oblivious to Jon's struggle or trying to remain politely unaware. "But you can stop him, Archivist. You know you can stop him."

How long have they been walking? And to where?

"Here's the house," Oliver says, stopping in front of a glass door, a wall full of letterboxes. He lifts Jon's hand from his arm, and holds it to his lips, elegant in a way Jon thought nobody could be these days. "I trust you'll know what to do."

And he melts into the fog that surrounds Jon all too often these days, and when Jon blinks and calls his name nobody replies. The door is all there is, and the letterboxes and the fog, and Martin somewhere inside with a book that wants to kill him, or eat him, or remove him from the world.

"Oh, God," Jon says, just once, and then he squares his shoulders and melts through the door.

Just as though he was never there at all. 

Jon has always been a coward, and vanishing is so much easier than being there.

Jamie isn't home when Martin gets there, and he's almost very pleased about that, before a little part of him raises a voice to wonder  _ why  _ exactly that brings him so much happiness. The kitchen is dark and empty, and he almost forgets to take his boots off at the door, and the whole place feels as though nobody has ever lived there at all. A little spider spins her web beside the coat-pegs above the table next to the door, and normally Martin would chase her out - Jamie hates spiders, but Martin hates the way people turn to squashing them without question - but today he leaves her be. Let Jamie raise a ruckus if he wants to, when he gets home. 

His mum always hated bugs. She kept a clean house, when she had a house to keep.

The book is burning a hole in the bottom of Martin's bag, and so he pulls it out as fast as he can, thudding it down on the kitchen table, ignoring everything else. He doesn't bother to turn the light on. There's light from somewhere in the room, but he can't tell where.

There's an inscription on the front:  _ For my dear M. in the hope she will read this some day and discover the change she has wrought.  _ Martin doesn't know much about the history of books like this, about the people who made them, so he can't really make a stab at who  _ M _ might be, but he wonders if Sasha might.

He should ask Sasha.

He  _ will  _ ask Sasha. Why didn't he ask her before, when she was over at his desk, even after she'd asked him what he was doing?

Yes, he'll ask Sasha. This book doesn't belong with someone like Martin. This book belongs in the Institute, where people exist who know how to take care of it, where people have real expertise in this sort of thing instead of just vaguely lying and hoping for the best.

He opens the book. He opens the book, he opens the book, he puts his hand on the cover and he opens the book at a random page -

_ The Sin of Life is no less grievous than the Sin of Being Born, for while the one is a singular occurrence, the other is something you must dedicate yourself to daily. Every morning you wake up and commit yourself to continuing another cycle in the world, you are attempting that, the worst of sins, the Sin of Living, without any heed given to what you might cause in the world without your knowledge. _

_ The Sin of Life is, therefore, not to be underestimated. You have sinned in Life. _

_ Martin Blackwood, you have sinned in life. When you lied to your mother for the first eighteen years of your existence about the name she had given you, and when you lied to your first boyfriend about what you wanted to do in the bedroom, and when you stole a packet of Wine Gums from the Spar when you were four, and when you took a sports bra from JD Sports without paying because you couldn't afford it and you thought it might help. Did it help, Martin? Did it help? You have sinned when you lied. You have sinned when you told Jamie you liked it, you have sinned when you told your mother you didn't, you have sinned when you led that woman on in the bar because she had a packet of cigarettes and you had smoked all of yours. _

_ You have sinned and that is unacceptable and unforgivable. _

_ Don't you wish you could erase it? _

"Don't you wish..." Martin mumbles. It doesn’t strike him as odd that the book has recorded his sins in writing, only shameful that he’s committed them in the first place. He hasn't thought about some of that in  _ years.  _ The scars on his chest cease to remind him about any of it, and certainly if it bothers Jamie he never says. "Don't you wish you could erase it," he repeats, and as he says it he realises it's true - he  _ does  _ wish he could erase it.

He wants to get rid of it.

The baggage of having lived an imperfect life. The things that keep him up at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering if it'll ever stop following him around.

What luck, then, that this book has turned up when it did. 

"I do," he tells the book, and he knows it's his imagination but he could swear the thing is purring at him, or smiling at him, or grinning at him. "I do, I do, I want to get rid of it."

And just as his hand is questing for the next page, he hears somebody shouting his name.

"Martin!  _ Martin! Martin!" _

Jon can see Martin through the doorway to the kitchen, but every time he tries to walk through it's like there's something stopping him, something invisible and unseen but desperately, offensively strong. He puts his shoulder to the thing and he can feel it humming against him, refusing to budge away no matter how hard he pushes; Jon wishes he had dragged Oliver up with him, to be the muscle if nothing else. "Martin!" He shouts again. "Martin, please,  _ don't read it!  _ Don't believe it, whatever it says, it's not  _ true,  _ Martin-"

And it seems to be working, hope against hope it seems to be working. Martin looks up, the page half-turned already, his face drawn and white with whatever the book is saying to him, but Jon has interrupted.

Jon has stopped him, but he can't do anything more. He just has to stare and remember what it felt like to hold him, to have him right there, to put his face between his hands and kiss Martin very softly, like he had all the time in the world to do it.

"Martin," he whispers, or breathes, "Martin..."

But Martin cannot, or will not, reply.

For Martin's part, he looks up to the sound of his name being called and sees himself again, pressed against the empty space between the kitchen and the hall, wearing different clothes, his hair longer than it usually is, greyer; just like the other version of himself he can't stop seeing in reflections everywhere he goes. He sees himself calling his own name, hand pressed to the empty space looking like a mime during a windy day. "I…"

"Martin, I love you-" Jon says, and then cuts himself off because he can do better than that, he can try  _ harder  _ than that. 

"Martin, he loves you," the other Martin tells him solemnly. "He loves you." 

"But  _ who,"  _ Martin asks himself helplessly, his hand now pressed against the flat of the page listing all the reasons he's led a life so desperately flawed he should really just end it. "Who, who, who-"

"You know who loves you," he tells himself. Has he always been that tall? That broad and unafraid? Martin used to hate the bulk of himself, the way he couldn't make himself as small as the girls in his class or the people on the Tube, the way he has to take up the whole seat and maybe even the edges of the ones beside him, the way he gets in the way when he goes through doorways. The Martin talking to him is tall and proud and unafraid, like he knows exactly how much space he's taking up and he doesn't care.

Or he does care, and it makes him happy.

"I know, I know," Martin starts pulling at the edge of the paper, more a nervous tic than anything else, "It's - it's Jamie, isn't it."

But the other Martin is shaking his head. He looks... sad, and a little lonely, but more like he's gone through the shrieking horror and come out the other side, like he's resigned himself to whatever fate he lives in. "It isn't Jamie. You know it isn't Jamie."

_ Jamie doesn't love me.  _ "Jamie says he loves me," Martin says, and his voice is trembling a little bit, "And I don't - I've been with Jamie, you, you  _ know  _ I've been with Jamie for years. Who else - who else could there be?"

"I love you," someone says from behind the other Martin and he wants to  _ see  _ but his own self hides whoever it is, this broad body with a cast of broad bodies behind him hiding whoever is speaking.

"Who is that!"

"You know who it is," the other Martin says.

_ "Martin, I love you." _

"Who is Jon," Martin says, desperately now because he knows (he knows, this always happens, it always happens) the other Martin will go before he's given him any real answers. "I know you know who he is, and all I want to know is where - who - is who he is, who is Jon,  _ why can I remember things that didn't happen-" _

The other Martin, although he must be the same age as Martin himself, looks at him with the sort of face Martin might give to a vaguely pitiable child. "You know who Jon is. You know  _ somewhere  _ there. Don't read the book, Martin."

The last sentence is laid over with another voice, that unfamiliar voice that Martin knows he shouldn't know so well.  _ Don't read the book, Martin,  _ says Jon, and Martin hears years and layers of care and inside jokes and little soft glances over the top of books and under the frames of glasses. Notes, things like that.  _ I enjoyed this one,  _ and advice when he was applying to university, and warm, comforting hugs when he would panic and a kiss on his cheek, and a press to the back of his hand, and a text offering to buy croissants from Lidl on the way home.

Martin has never lived that life. Those memories are not his own.

And yet he remembers them. 

The man is called Jon, he knows that, and there is the smell of  _ Head & Shoulders _ , and the sound of the shipping forecast on Radio Four in the mornings over pressed coffee, and the feel of his head on Martin’s shoulder because he’s so much smaller. When Martin was in school he thought he’d never date a man who was shorter - smaller, even, but he’s a big man. A broad man. And Jon is very slight. The shipping forecast is not without its fraught complications, from a time when it was the only other voice Martin heard, it and Peter through the fog, and he listens to it now to cling himself to the rest of the world, to remind him that the fog is gone and he will never allow it back, and - 

And he remembers all this in a rush. 

“I can’t fix this,” his other self tells him. Tall and confident. Everything Martin thinks he isn’t. “I can’t fix this, Martin, I can’t change it, but they - but you, you  _ can.  _ They can. Trust your friends. Jon misses you, and he - and he loves you.”

“He loves me,” Martin whispers, but the words are not his own. A disbelieving echo. He loves me?

The other Martin smiles all sad and small. “I promise you he does.”

Jon watches Martin touch the book a little longer, his eyes still focused on whatever he's seeing in the doorway. It certainly isn't Jon, much as he wishes it was; Martin's gaze is focused on a spot about a head above Jon's own, and he looks a lot more - upset, than Jon thinks he would if he could see who is really there. The conversation he's having doesn't mirror what Jon is saying at all, because Jon keeps urging Martin to put the book away, to bring it to Sasha, and all Martin keeps saying is something about love. He looks misty-eyed.

_ This isn't working. _

Jon hadn't wanted to face the fact that Martin can't see him. His parents, fine. Daisy, fine. Tim, fine, the whole world, fine, but he had been holding out hope that Martin - his Martin, his own Martin - might be different.  _ Why isn't this working?  _ Had it been stupid to think that, what, the power of love might still save the day?

Abruptly Jon is angry. He's looking at Martin, looking at the book now safely closed and quiet on the kitchen table, and all Jon wants is to be home and waking up to the sound of the shipping forecast and the press of a kiss against his forehead and he is angry he is  _ angry,  _ because so many things have happened to him that he didn't ask to have done, and he has served the Eye as best he can and he has loved his Martin has best he can and still - 

And still - 

And  _ still  _ it isn't enough. 

He wants to scream, or punch something, or hurt something. In the absence of anything else he digs his fingers into the thigh of his bad leg until he feels the burning nerves, the proper ache of it, and the pain steels the anger in a way, puts a wall up above it so it can't grow any taller. He wants to - he wants to - 

But that's the problem. He doesn't know.

Jon stands and watches Martin until he's certain the book won't be read today, and then with a slump to his shoulders he begins to shuffle towards the door. "I want you to remember I love you," he whispers in the vague hope it might register in Martin's mind somewhere, somehow. "If you remember nothing else remember that."

And Martin hears it and he wonders, and he thinks, and he wracks his brain, and he puts the book back in his bag unread. Life and its nature will just have to care about themselves, for now.

**Scene Nineteen: Difficult Decisions**

Georgie let's herself into Melanie's apartment with the key she hasn't given back yet, and sets it down on the table. "You can keep the charm," she says, and they both look down at it; one of those commemorative keychains you get at Alton Towers with a picture of the pair of them about to hit the steep incline on the rollercoaster.

"Thanks," says Melanie shortly. She really isn't sure why Georgie didn't just throw it out herself before she got here - surely Georgie doesn't think Melanie will do anything with it but throw it out, or burn it, or do something else suitably dramatic? The blurry pixels are irritatingly expensive. Melanie queued for twenty minutes for the photo, and they bought a matching set because it seemed like the sort of thing you just had to do.

In truth, this whole  _ thing  _ has Melanie more on edge than ever. The hallucinations - and isn't that what you'd call them, hallucinations? - at the same time as their messy, difficult breakup, at the same time as all that stupid business with the ghosts and the channel and the voice in her head telling her that she  _ does  _ know someone called Jon, she knows him very well and she loves him, except she's never met him before in her life.

"I just need those books," Georgie says, after a few seconds of incredibly awkward silence.

Melanie misses when they could talk, when it flowed easy between them without the pausing, wondering what will cause the least offence. Towards the end talking with Georgie became like navigating her way around a minefield of things that would be taken the wrong way or not taken at all, and Melanie knows she's had an equal hand in that - she could see the way Georgie would hesitate in case Melanie might blow up, and she could feel the way her fuse shortened and burnt out at the slightest provocation. Melanie misses Georgie.

But she doesn't want to say so.

That chance is long gone.

"The books," Georgie prompts again, shoving her hands in her pockets now, scuffing her shoe against the floor. "Just the ones... in your room. The ones for research."

"I'll get them," Melanie jumps at the chance to be in a different room to Georgie, practically springing for the door into the lounge from the kitchenette. Georgie always did deeper research for her episodes than Melanie did for hers, but then Georgie had less to rely on - Melanie could always show a shaky handheld clip of her running in the dark, shrieking about spirits, whereas Georgie and her calm, measured voice had nothing but facts and the compelling nature of a good true story to keep her audience hooked.

The books are piled in a heap where Georgie left them, beside the arm of the sofa in the lounge. Melanie kneels with the sound of her knees popping, stroking her hand over the spines of the old library books, the pretty Moleskine notebooks, the Penguin Classics, the unmarked clothbound books a lot older and rarer than the rest. "Are all of these yours?" Melanie calls, although she knows they are. Georgie was always a bigger reader than she was.

At the bottom of the heap is a photo album, one of the small ones Melanie once bought her mate Sarah out of  _ Urban Outfitters,  _ the sort that fit the little photos that the pastel polaroid cameras print out. "Huh," Melanie says to herself, sitting back on the floor, books to the side. She can hear Georgie in the kitchen still, pottering about, opening and closing shelves - hunting for her expensive coffee, probably, the sort she has a terrible addiction to but Melanie would never touch.

Fair enough.

Melanie opens the unfamiliar photo album, and is hit with a picture she doesn't remember being taken, but which she must have been present for; a polaroid with that sepia filter they all have, her and Georgie with their arms around one another, mid-laugh, both wearing colourful wigs and comically oversized sunglasses of the sort they offer for costumes in photobooths.

"Huh," she says again.

Over the page is another one she has no memory of, but must have been there for; she, Georgie, and a man she sort of recognises, all holding glasses of stout under their chins with the frothy moustache that comes from drinking a freshly-poured pint. Georgie's head is shaved, here, although Melanie never remembers her wearing her hair any shorter than her ears; the man is someone Melanie knows she's seen recently, a large, round sort of face with glasses and greying blonde hair, dimples and a very handsome smile. For her part, Melanie is wearing a shirt she doesn't recognise and round, dark glasses, and there's two canes propped up against the table they're sitting at; one is long and pale, like the sort she's seen the blind use on the Tube, with the round end to feel the surroundings. The other cane is dark with a shiny, curved end, like it's been used often. Shorter than the other cane, more like a walking stick.

_ Weird. _

The third photo is the man again, the big one with the lovely smile, and another man Melanie knows she knows.

It's Jon.

She knows it's Jon.  _ Who is Jon?  _ And that's his - his, his husband or something. His partner. His something. Jon and the man are sitting on a park bench, the walking-stick between them, looking all sappy off at something in the middle distance, just to the left of whoever has taken the photo. Jon is smaller than the husband or whoever-he-is, and darker, too, although not as grey; his hair is all shot through with colour, salt and peppery, and plaited over one shoulder. His skin is scarred, and his eyes are heavy and tired and green, and he dresses like an alternative grandmother, but Melanie knows that's Jon with all she has in her.

"Have you got my books?" Melanie doesn't respond in time and she can hear Georgie's heavy sigh. "What are you looking at?"

"Do you... remember this?" Melanie stands with the same groan of complaint from her knees, flipping to the picture of her, Georgie, and the husband in the bar with the pint moustaches. "Do you remember this happening?"

Georgie takes the photo album with bemusement that turns confused in a moment. "No? Who's  _ that?" _

"I saw him... today, oh my God, I saw him today. I met him today. The - the Magnus Institute, do you know it?"

"The  _ Magnus Institute?  _ What were you doing there?"

"Do you recognise this man," Melanie says instead of answering, turning the page to show Georgie the man she knows is Jon, "Have you ever seen him before?  _ Ever?  _ Please, please think. Have you?"

She watches Georgie's face intently, but the woman's expression never changes. "Who is it? Am I meant to know him? What - Mel, what the fuck were you doing poking around the Magnus Institute?"

"I think you better sit down," Melanie says. "I have... some things to tell you. About. About what's been happening to me."

The Archivist rubs her palm over her eyes, and wishes she was at home. Last night she paid a visit to Jude Perry, one of the many spurned women throughout Britain that fell in love with Agnes - the Lightless Flame's attempt at a Messiah - before she killed herself a few years ago. Sasha has always found it difficult to move amongst the rest of the entities, or at least, amongst the things that call themselves avatars; especially Jude. Sasha met her in a nightclub almost a decade ago, on a night out with her boyfriend at the time, back when she had barely become the Archivist and back before she realised how to pull the strings of the man above.

Jude had found her at the bar and introduced herself, and Sasha, not knowing any better, had said hello. Her boyfriend - Thomas, she thinks his name was - vanished to the bathrooms and in the way of clubs everywhere, got quickly swallowed by the crowd, but Jude had told Sasha they would be fine.  _ Come and dance with me,  _ she had said, and her shoulder was very warm when Sasha had touched it, and she had painted her eyes with something orange and sparkling, and she laughed. She laughed a lot.

They danced and Sasha forgot about Thomas, or whatever the fuck his name had been, and she thought maybe she could go back with Jude... maybe Jude could come back with her, and they could have a night together and then a morning together and then maybe a few days together.

Jude had leaned closer.  _ "Ask me,"  _ she whispered.

Sasha had just learned to compel, but hadn't learned enough to know when she shouldn't do it.  _ "Come back with me,"  _ she said, her voice crackling,  _ "Come and see what I have." _

Jude had laughed again but it hadn't sounded so pretty, or maybe it had sounded  _ prettier,  _ and she put her hand on Sasha's hip all possessive and hot and, woah, and  _ really  _ hot and that hurt quite a bit and then Sasha woke up on Tim's sofa, her face on a pillow, to the sound of Tim watching a YouTube video about how to treat first degree burns with supplies from the kitchen.

Anyway.

So Sasha had visited Jude to ask if  _ she  _ had ever heard of Jon Sims, a loose Archivist without an Archive in a world where he no longer exists. He had looked pitiful, between the two officers, and Sasha wondered (although not to Jude, obviously, she isn't  _ mental)  _ how much worse, or better, the Archives might be under him. She wondered what he had done with Elias.

_ Anyway.  _ Jude had been useless. "There's something going on with the End, but that's not my problem," she told Sasha, sliding her tumbler of dark orange whisky across the top of the bar where Sasha had found her. "Too fucking complicated. Go find Oliver, ask him."

"Oliver never wants to be found," Sasha had said, aware she was whining and not sure of how to stop it.

"What did I say? Not. My. Problem."

"Jude..."

"Don't  _ Jude  _ me," she had said, and her tongue flicked out to catch a droplet of the liquor, dark and hot and frightening, "I didn't make this problem and so it isn't mine to care about. For that matter, neither did you. Let this - Sims bloke and Oliver fight it out between them."

"I can't."

"And I repeat: problem. Not. Mine."

Which brings Sasha to here, pressing her hand into her eyes until she sees green behind her eyelids, wishing Tim had poured something a little stronger into the coffee he brought half an hour ago. It's cold, now.

"Are you  _ sure  _ you want to do this now?" Martin asks tentatively, from the chair he's pulled up for himself on the other side of her desk. He's clutching his bag to his chest protectively, and there must only be one thing in it, because the cloth has folded around it, around the four corners and the thick spine.

If you had told Sasha when she was twelve that she would have a justified fear of old books, she would have told you to shut up and stop lying. Now she's here hoping that the thing in his bag is just a lunchbox he's particularly fond of, instead of anything worse, but she's heard Jon's story from last week, and she's  _ existed  _ in a world where books kill you for too long to be stupid. "We have to do this now," she says. "Just - just say what you want to say, and then we can sort it out. Is this relevant to the - to the - to the everything happening right now?"

She hopes it isn't. She hopes this is just one of Martin's badly-timed chats about something else, like pay or holidays or about how he thinks that someone is following him around.

(Again.)

(I mean, she thinks he's wonderful, but it  _ is  _ still Martin, at the end of the day.)

He looks at her like she's stupid. "I'm hearing voices," he says, as plain as Martin can ever be, "And I'm seeing things that aren't there, and this book followed me home from work last week, and Jamie didn't come home last night and I didn't even care, and I rang the home and they’ve never heard of Rachel Blackwood and I didn’t care -  _ I didn't care.  _ Who is Jon?"

Sasha feels something cold on her hip, right where Jude touched her. "Jon?"

"Don't be - I'm not stupid, Sasha. There's all this shit about the End, and Oliver is skulking around again even though everyone knew he went to fucking - to fucking Iceland, didn't he, and you went to see Jude last night and Tim's been out drinking and those police in last week and - and everything feels wrong," Martin talks like he's running up to pitch a bowl, sort of stumblingly powerful, even though he's all pink and awkward, "And you can't try and put it away and pretend it isn't happening. This book is something else. I almost read it, and it told me-" He breaks off and blinks. "Just tell me who Jon is.  _ Please,  _ Sasha."

"I don't really know," she admits, and it takes a lot to even say it.

_ The Archivist doesn't know something,  _ Jude said last night.  _ Now that's one for the books. What do you want me to do about it? _

“So what can we do about it?”

“I don’t know,” says Sasha again. 

Years ago, she and Tim had been at Tim’s apartment, with a bottle of red each and a stack of Hugh Grant films from the nineties. He had his feet in her lap, and she was pushing her thumb into the stiff arches, listening to him put on the sort of exaggerated moans that girls do in films. He hadn’t cut his hair at this point, and it trailed long and curly over his ears down to his shoulders - Sasha liked to plait it in little braids and tie them off with elastic bands where he couldn’t see them, so he’d be out doing something sensible with lots of little strands poking out the back of his head. And - and anyway, years ago, she had been at Tim’s place, and he had suddenly shuddered and his eyes had slipped shut and when he opened them he had looked at Sasha with an anger that shocked her right down to her core, and he had said  _ Jon. I don’t know if you can hear me, but if you can… I don’t forgive you. But thank you for this.  _

And then he had blinked, and shook his head. “Huh,” he said. “Felt like someone just walked over my grave.”

“I don’t know,” Sasha says in the present she finds herself in. A present she’s really starting to doubt is the right one. “Martin, do you - are you  _ happy?” _

He looks confused to have been asked, and Sasha supposes it is a funny sort of a question to get from someone who is only nominally either a boss or a friend. “What do you - what do you mean?”

“In life,” Sasha waves her hand like that will make the question more normal, “Are you… do you feel like you’re missing - I’m sorry. This is coming out wrong. Do you feel like you  _ miss  _ someone called Jon?”

“I don’t know. If I was missing him I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t know,” Martin says but he’s always worn his feelings in his eyes and Sasha can see that he’s lying. 

She doesn’t tell him about how sometimes she wakes up and is surprised at the appearance of the face she sees in the mirror when she brushes her teeth, listening to the  _ Comedy of the Week  _ on BBC Sounds, as though she isn’t supposed to look like that. Wasn’t she shorter, when she went to bed? Was her skin always this colour? Has she dyed her hair?

“We need to get Melanie King back, I think,” Sasha says instead of any of that. “And we need to… talk to Elias.”

“Oh, Christ,” says Martin, but he doesn’t disagree. 

Sasha discovered the secret -  _ open  _ secret - of the Institute only a few months into being assigned Head Archivist. She was already close to the Spiral, when she was just a researcher, and so she knew more about it going in than she thinks Gertrude had, and certainly more than Tim  _ or  _ Martin or Christine, the third assistant Elias had given her. The Spiral had been a young girl called Nadiya back then, long fingers and a big smile and wide, pretty eyes, and they had come to Sasha's door and said  _ don't you want to know who's really pulling the strings? _

Sasha has never found it easy to get along with the other avatars or the other entities. Sometimes she feels like she shouldn't have been the Archivist at all - Martin, certainly, if he wasn't so fucking  _ wet  _ could have been the avatar of something, and Tim is driven enough to have gotten the job done. Christine was -

Christine was -

Christine could have been a great many things.

Nadiya the Spiral had told Sasha about Elias in no uncertain terms. At the time Sasha thought it was friendly, and after all, Elias hadn't begun  _ properly  _ preparing for the Crown; she had only been touched by a few of the entities, Nadiya among them, and Jude was still a whisper on the breeze. Now of course Sasha knows the Spiral had eyes on her (hah. Eyes) becoming some sort of vehicle for a second attempt at the Great Twisting.

It Is Not What It Is, after all. But Nadiya had told Sasha about what Elias was planning and about who he truly was, and they had armed themselves accordingly; Tim and Sasha had blindfolded each other, and Martin they just hadn't told out of a fear he would do something stupid with the information. She loves him. She does. But it can't be denied that he has a tendency, even now, to bumble under pressure and break instead of cracking (but that feels wrong. Is that the Martin she knows? She smells burning, and a quiet confidence, and the Martin she doesn’t know is laughing) - 

And so it had been Tim and Christine and Sasha that went up to the office at the top of the Institute, scarves wrapped around their eyes. Sasha had a Swiss Army Knife. Tim, she knows, had a long, thin piece of piping he peeled from the wall of an unused storage room in the archives. They had burst in all righteous fury, all  _ why are you using me and for what purpose,  _ and Elias had been drinking with Peter Lukas, that horrible Lonely man.

Sasha still sees it sometimes, on dark nights when she considers ringing Tim for that second try that never happened. Elias sitting on his desk, his legs spread, the fabric tight around his thighs and loose around his ankles, the top button of his shirt undone and his tie off, hanging around the back of the chair. The eye on the back of his neck. Peter Lukas, his hands on Elias' waist, his eyes shut, humming something sad and slow. She saw it all in one go, ripping the blindfold off her head, and then she -

And then she -

Christine died. Peter killed her. He killed her all in one go, mournful fury, opening his mouth wide and then opening it louder and then there was the noise like how Sasha imagines being inside a tornado must be and then Christine wasn't there anymore and Peter was on the floor, on his knees, hands in the dust he had made of her, making a sound.

Sasha always finds it faintly embarrassing, seeing grown men cry. She knows it's wrong. She knows they can cry all they like, but seeing Lukas on his knees sobbing into his palms felt  _ wrong - _

Until Tim hit him, very hard, on the back of the skull with the pipe. Then there was no sound at all.

And Sasha's knife, all the way up to the red hilt of it, in Elias' right eye. "You can't have done that," he whispered, but the eye that remained was looking right at Peter's body and Sasha could have felt guilty. She really could have. "You can't have done that," he kept saying as Tim and Sasha dragged him back to the chair he hadn't been sitting on, tying his wrists so tight they burned purple to the arms of it. "You can't have... you can't have..."

On quiet days in the Institute, you can still hear the voice floating down the stairs.  _ You can't have... you can't have... _

Sasha goes up the stairs feeling heavy. There is a gap in her knowledge, a big, human-shaped gap, and it centres wholly around Jon, all fragile and sad and hunched over in her office as though the world was too big for him. She wonders what Martin would have answered, if she'd just given him more time.

She wonders about Martin. Sometimes, when she looks at him, she thinks she didn’t invite him because he wouldn’t have known when to stop. 

The door still says  _ Elias Bouchard - Head of the Magnus Institute  _ on it in that gold plate, but everyone knows the place cycles mostly on momentum now. Sasha hasn't the time to run a physical foundation as well as everything else, and she had been intending to shut the place down once Elias died, but he hasn't done that and the Institute keeps existing somehow - somehow. The Beholding is not its avatar.

Evidently.

She pushes it open. It doesn't shut.

_ "Sssssassssha,"  _ whispers the thing that was once Jonah Magnus, and Sasha stands in the pool of light the corridor creates just inside the door, fists bunched by her sides. She refuses to be cowed.  _ "Sssso you have come to ssssseee me. It has been ssssso long." _

Elias has long been eaten by him. All the way down to the bones, cracked and drank out of, pushed into the corner with all the rest of the people he has been given through the years. Nobody  _ good,  _ of course, but the Eye continues to have enemies, and Sasha has quite a strong incentive to stay alive. She feeds him when she has to. 

And so Jonah Magnus, or the bastardised thing he refuses to stop becoming, is a mass of cracked pupil, a consciousness that clings to the darkest corners of the office, tied where they left him, a hand here and a knee there, all feeding into the single eye that refuses to just go away.  _ "Archivissst,"  _ he says, and Sasha's skin crawls but she has beaten him and he is hers, now,  _ "You aren't my Archivissssst." _

"What do you know about Jonathan Sims?" She demands. Her palms are clammy. She is very aware that the socks she's wearing are too tight around her ankles, and they have a stupid pattern on them, and she knows that he can tell.

_ "Jonathan Ssssims? No ssssuch person. None that we know." _

"You're lying."

All of the eyes, just one of the eye, look directly at her.  _ "How would you know, Archivisssst?" _

"I know."

**_"Liar."_ **

Sasha pushes and the Eye pulls. She grits her teeth, and pours as much compulsion as she can down her throat, into the air, pushing it with the tip of her tongue.  **"What do you know about Jonathan Sims?"**

The thing that was once Jonah Magnus and is now the absence of anyone at all screams. It's a horrible scream, six voices all crying out at once, and if Sasha cared to she's sure she could parse them out just like unravelling a jumper, from Jonah to James to Elias and all the way back again through a few on the journey.  _ "Sssssstop!" _

**"Tell me about him."** Compulsion is like - is like - once Sasha took a line, from a girl she didn't know at a house party hosted by somebody she didn't know, back when she was young enough to think it was a bad idea. Compulsion feels like that. The shock to the system as something new goes into it that shouldn't be there, and then the juddering disorientating feeling of euphoria, of knowing where all of your bones are, of seeing every colour in the room at once, of hearing the bass from  _ Message in a Bottle  _ in your chest, and of doing all this in the moment it takes to get from one jackhammering heartbeat to the next.  **"Tell me about Jonathan Sims,"** Sasha says with power running out her, and the thing that was once Jonah Magnus cowering away,  **"Tell me about the Archivist That Should Have Been."**

_ "He wasssss nothing and now he issss nothing. He wassss a nobody and I took him and I made him ssssomething and I was not what I am. He isssss a missstake. He issss kept alive by only one thing. Only one thing. Only one thing." _

Sasha breathes in.  **"Tell. Me."**

_ "Assssssk Martin Blackwood about what it feelsss like to be loved,"  _ hisses the malignant,  _ "Asssssk Melanie King what it feelssss like to looose her. Ask Georgie Barker if ssssshe went to the zoo that night. Ask Timothy Stoker if he forgivessss. Ask Basira Hussain if ssshe forgetssss. Ask Alice Toner if sssshe ssssleeps at night. You can do nothing, Archivissssst. The choice is never up to you. You are for reading, not for being read." _

Sasha takes one step back, and then two, and then three and then the thing that was once Jonah Magnus and is now the absence of anyone at all makes a sound that might be a sob, if it were human.

She thinks about it, sometimes, when she can't sleep and she doesn't want to text anyone. How many people has she saved? How many people has she killed?

What bothers her most of all is that she doesn't care.

Sasha turns around and walks down the stairs and if she's shaking, she doesn't show it. Nobody sees her do anything at all. 

**Scene Twenty: Threads**

Jon lies flat on his back on one of the long seats in the National Gallery, looking at the ceiling, thinking about Martin. 

Or, no, that's not true, because he rarely thinks about Martin these days; rather, he lies there and thinks about the way he likes his toast, and how Martin always makes it for him, made it for him, or he lies there and thinks about his favourite wooden hairbrush, and how Martin bought it for him when they went briefly on holiday to the north of France, or he lies there and thinks about how he used to be able to sleep at night, and how Martin would snore when he lay on his back and Jon would put his head on Martin's chest and listen to his heartbeat and know that everything was all right.

Everything is circular. Everything is cyclical. 

At the centre of it is Martin. Always.

Jon can't remember what Martin's face looks like. Not  _ really.  _ He knows the basics; Martin is big and broad and once, at Melanie's flat, Jon accused him of being exactly like Winnie the Pooh and Martin had blushed and kissed him on the back of the neck. But did he have freckles, or does Jon just think that because he saw a man in the gift shop yesterday? How grey  _ was  _ his hair, or was it the ocean blonde that looks grey, or was it a different colour entirely?

Martin found his first grey hairs years after Jon did. Jon's parents went grey early, and so he was hardly surprised when aged twenty-nine he was already finding silvery bits on his hairbrush, but Martin's transformation was to do almost completely with the stress of the Lonely and the year he spent under Peter Lukas. "I'm still  _ young,"  _ he said to Jon (or did he?) "I can't be going  _ grey,"  _ and then Jon had kissed him on the dimple on his cheek (or had he?) and told him he was still the most handsome man in all of London, and possibly the world.

He knows Martin liked to wear open flannels and soft cloth shirts. Georgie does most of the clothes shopping for both of them. Not in a bad way, but just in a - a, like, the only time either of them get new clothes is at Christmas or on their birthdays, and Jon usually goes to Georgie for advice about that,  _ where did you get that t-shirt he loves? _

And boots. Martin bought boots from Primark until he was a few months into a halfway normal relationship with Jon.  _ They're cheaper,  _ he said, and Jon can see him (sort of) sitting cross-legged on the floor, peeling the sole back from the body of the shoe, looking helplessly at the undone laces.  _ They cost a lot less. _

Jon had sat down beside him, stretching out his bad leg and massaging his thigh with a sigh. He wears orthopaedic shoes on particularly bad days, and he remembers this was one.  _ But if you get a good pair of boots they'll last way longer than a cheap pair does. And you'll save money in the long run. _

Jon bought him a pair of leather boots for his birthday that year. Martin had laughed at him in that - now, was it a high giggle or a low rumble? - that distinctive laughter of his, and he wore them every day, even in summer.

But Jon has forgotten what he looks like.

And Jon has forgotten what he looks like.

Even the paintings in the gallery all look the same these days, and Jon can't remember who he is sometimes, or even if he was anyone at all to begin with. How long ago did he last speak to Oliver? It could have been yesterday. It could have been last year. Time doesn't really pass for Jon, anymore, only when he puts his mind to it, and he rarely wants to - what would be the point?

He thinks often about the Eye. He used to feel it strongly even through whatever murk he found himself in, like a rope around his waist, but now he has to put real effort into feeling anything at all in that dead connection he used to value - no, not value, but  _ have -  _ stronger than almost anything else. He tries to Know about his friends (but not Martin, never Martin) and he sees them in the mist, like statues, like pillars of salt, Georgie looking at her phone screen and Melanie doing something on her laptop and Tim - and Tim! - and Tim with his arm around Sasha, and Sasha - Sasha! - with her eye covered in faces (no, with her face covered in eyes) looking. Sasha is the one that Knows, now.

Daisy and Basira he doesn't look at. It hurts too much to know what they are, now, a wolf in the body of a woman and a woman who refuses to feel anything at all.

In the National Gallery, there is a long bench in front of  _ The Parting of Hero and Leander.  _ It used to be frequented by quite a lot of people stopping on their way from one room to the next, but now there is a conspicuous absence of traffic, as though people are warded away by the presence they cannot see; the presence that does not exist. 

Jon sits, but the longer he sits the more he becomes the thing that was once Jon Sims and is now nothing at all, and the less he remains himself. 

And what  _ did  _ Martin look like?

It takes a lot out of Martin, hanging t-shirts and sheets over the mirrors in his house. He can no longer remember whether he saw Jamie last week or last month, but things have started slipping away from him, like trying to hold sand in your cupped hands as a child, running along the beach to your mother calling for her to come and see, but the time you arrive at her side the sand has flooded out between your fingers and there's nothing left but crumbs, and dust, and her sympathetic smile.  _ Poor little child, and the world is so big and you are so small,  _ her smile says.

It takes a lot out of Martin. He can see himself. Not  _ himself,  _ but the version that lives in mirrors and reflections, his hands pressed against the glass, his cheeks wan and hollow now, his hair completely silver. He looks thin. He looks on the verge of - of -

It takes a  _ lot  _ out of Martin. It really does.

One day he goes into work pale and shaking, and he can't remember the name of his boyfriend but he knows he was loved, once, and held by someone with arms warm and mouth warmer, and he finds a gathering of people far larger than any group he's had to interact with in weeks beyond the clumps in the Tube station and on the train and in the big Tesco when he can get up the energy to go to it.

He brought the book. He brings the book most places, and thinks about reading it, but always that little voice brings him back from turning the cover to the middle of the book; the voice from behind the bulk of his other body. The voice belongs to someone small, he thinks, not at all like him. He probably takes up almost no space at all.

Martin wonders how small he could be folded up. He wonders if he asked a friend, would they do it for him.

"Good afternoon, Martin," Sasha says, although Martin had thought he was coming into work in the mornings. Maybe he never was at all.

"Good afternoon," he replies anyway, because Martin wants more than anything else for other people to think there's nothing at all the matter. "What's - what's the occasion?"

Tim and Sasha are there, that much makes sense, but the two policewomen? He thinks one is called Daisy, and the other one is called - called something-Hussain. And Melanie King, for some reason, and Martin is at least glad that she isn't crying down the end of the phone this time, and another woman, tall with hair cropped close to her skull, wearing a beautiful floral shirt and a pair of black denim dungarees. She's standing beside Melanie but awkwardly, as though she doesn't really know what she's doing here. The last man is familiar to Martin but in a way he can't place; tall and well-built, muscular through a white shirt, a black blazer over his forearm. He is dark and handsome, with a glimmer in his sorrowful eyes, and Martin feels - Martin feels -

For the first time in a very long time.

"We think we need to... I mean, Oliver told me some things, and we need to..." Sasha struggles, but pulls herself together. "Did you bring the book?"

"The - the book?"

Sasha looks pointedly at his bag. "Jon's book."

After so long ignoring him, and ignoring whatever's going on, the name comes as something of a slap in the face, and Martin can't help but flinch. "The - the -"

Tim comes up to him and eases Martin's bag off his shoulder, with a gentle kindness very characteristic of him in private, but less so in a space with this many people. "I..."

"It has affected Martin more, of course it has," says the new man, the cold one with the blazer, "But I didn't think it would be to this extent. Even I have trouble finding Jon, now. He's faded a lot. Martin’s probably moving towards him, even now. Could you see him, Detective? And could you hold him?"

These last two questions are directed to Detective Hussain and Daisy in turn, who both shake their heads.

"As I thought," the man says, and nods. "If anything can be done, it would need to be now, or very soon. He is almost at the point where he never existed at all."

And that makes a certain sort of sense, if Martin twists his mind through a few holes and sideways, and he is so accustomed these days to being two steps behind the rest of the world that he lets it all happen to him. Wash over him. He's been smelling salt a lot these days, and he's only ever been on the beach once and he's never forgotten the smell. When he was young and he read  _ The Lord of the Rings  _ in the library he thought maybe he was suffering from sea-longing himself, like Legolas had, and he would get to build a boat and sail away to heaven. Everything was simpler when he was small. Everything made a lot more sense, and he didn't have to think so hard, but he couldn't be Legolas because Legolas was tall and blonde and he was dumpy and his hair hadn't lightened yet, but Martin always liked him because he was a boy and he had long hair, and at that point his mum wouldn't let him cut his.

Anyway.

_ Anyway. _

"He never... existed," Martin repeats, as Tim hands the book to the man. "Who - who is he? I didn't know he'd ever existed. That we - that we know, anyway."

The new man looks at him sympathetically. "Have you not been told?"

"I-"

"What do you see when you look at your reflection?"

Martin bunches up his hand by his side, and he wishes he was in the loop. He wishes people told him things. He wishes he was the sort of person people wanted to tell things to. "I see myself."

"Mm. And what does he say?"

"He says..." Martin can feel himself turning red, underneath the fog. "He says that he - that  _ Jon -  _ that he... he does. He is... that is to say-"

The man apparently takes pity on him, or something, because he interrupts before Martin can go on any longer. "He tells me that too, you know. Or he did. Before he... sunk deeper."

"Sunk deeper?"

"Sit, Martin," Sasha says, and he feels a hand on his elbow and the world coming back to him, "And Oliver will... explain. He's been explaining a lot, I think. Or doing a lot. Either way, he - just come and sit."

Martin lets himself be pushed into a chair, and he is almost pleased to see that the floral-shirted woman beside Melanie King (and indeed Melanie herself) looks as confused as he feels. Tim, Sasha, and the two policewomen are steely and grim, but he feels less alone when he knows that he isn't the only one in the room who doesn't know the big secret. The Big Secret. The book feels cold where he touches it sometimes, and he wants more than anything to read it, but Martin has always been more stubborn than was good for him, and he guesses it has to pay off for him at some point or other. "Tell me, then. It can't be all that bad or we would be flapping all over the place."

Tim shrugs. "Decide for yourself, mate."

Oliver, the strange man in the suit and the shone shoes, smiles at him with absolutely no warmth behind his eyes. His hair is dark and glossy. Martin wonders what it would feel like to touch. "Jon. Do you recall anything about him, or will I tell you, or do you not want to know?"

"I think you should tell me," Martin says, more decisive than he's been in weeks. (He can't even choose between wholegrain or white rice in the supermarket most days. Health or happiness? It isn't that deep, Martin, shut up.) "The mirror - I've been hearing it. Voices. Him. Not multiple voices, just the one, but it's him - it's him. It's Jon. Do you know him?"

Oliver looks steadying at Sasha before he begins, and he swallows, and Martin can see his Adam's apple bob underneath his dark skin, and he feels fleetingly jealous before the man begins. "Jonathan Sims was his name when he was real," he says in a deep and sonorous voice, "He was five foot nine, shoulder-length hair, aged thirty five. Going grey. His mother was called Maya and his father was called Colin and he was born in Britain, in Bournemouth, although his mother was born in India and his father in Ireland. They were both dead by the time he was six and he was raised by his grandmother on his father's side, a woman called Bernadette who raised him to be quiet and studious. He went to Oxford and graduated with a 2:1. He dated Georgie Barker-" here, Oliver gestures to the woman beside Melanie, who flinches- "But they broke up shortly before he came to work at the Institute, as they were not romantically compatible, I think I'll say. When he was twenty-nine he came to the Head Archivist position, over a department of you, Martin, Sasha, and Tim. He liked detective novels and Dickens and the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, and he liked New Wave music and he listened to BBC Three to concentrate, and he never learned to properly braid his hair. He enjoyed going to art galleries but he knew very little about the art. He liked to sit by windows in the rain and listen to the spatter. He was afraid of dying. He has two less ribs than he should, and on bad days he walks with a cane he insisted he didn't need. He was, and is, in love with you so completely that it makes him frightened. And one day he found that book you have there, and he opened it and he discovered the sin of his own birth and now he doesn't exist and never did. Jon Sims is nowhere because he is nobody." 

Martin sits and blinks and cannot think. In his mind he can  _ see  _ the man as though he was ever real, small and slender in a shirt too big for him, glasses around his neck on a string, holding onto a cane. He's smiling, and Martin loves him.

"I'm in love with him too," he whispers softly, and Oliver looks almost self-satisfied. Like he expected this - like he knew.

Martin has always been the last to know anything, though, hasn't he.

"So that's Jon," Sasha says, after an appropriate length of time has passed, after Martin brushes his hand over his mouth and thinks about the glass of water he thought he wouldn't drink this morning (this afternoon) before he left for work. "And now we have to decide what we do about him."

"I still think we don't have to do  _ anything,"  _ Tim says. His arms are folded across his chest, his shoulders high and his face set, Martin's bag still dangling from his elbow. "He existed, now he doesn't, but none of us remember him, so why-"

"I do," says Melanie quietly. While Oliver spoke, she had been dragging chairs up to everyone standing in the odd circle, and now she sits perched on the very edge of hers, her legs crossed, her foot in its bright pink boot dancing nervously on the vinyl floor. Tim looks at her and she scowls. "I remember him. I remember… bits of him, but I know I had a mate called Jon and he was like that and he was, like, okay. I fell out with him but we made up. I - he definitely existed. But when I asked Georgie and when I came here and then I mentioned to Sasha and… yeah. But nobody else can remember him, like he never existed in the first place. And apparently he never did."

"No offence, but you're one person," says Tim. His cheeks are pink and his jaw is tense, and Martin wonders what's got his hackles so high up. 

Melanie glares back at him. "Yeah, and I  _ know  _ he existed." 

"So did Oliver," Sasha cuts in.

Tim scoffs. "Yeah, like that  _ means  _ anything. Look at him."

Oliver opens his arms wide, and Martin sees him wink at Detective Hussain, who glowers at him like he's cursed in the church.

"That doesn't mean anything and you know it," Melanie fires back. Tim on his chair looks easily twice as big as she is, but all the same Martin isn't sure which one he would rather put his money on in a fight. "You work for the fucking  _ Magnus Institute,  _ and everyone knows you guys are just as fucking freaky as the rest of them. I mean - I mean - Oliver, you say. What could you get from this?"

"Something happened," says Daisy quietly. Detective Tonner. Her hair is pulled severely back from her skull and braided down her back, and Martin can see the skin at her temples straining with the sharpness of it, but she seems perfectly at ease.

She shrugs when everyone looks at her. Were her teeth always that sharp? Did her brown eyes always have such a tint of amber to them? "About six months ago something happened to the End.”

"The Coming End That Waits For All And Cannot Be Ignored," Oliver says in a sonorous, ritualistic voice that puts the capitalisations on the words without any effort at all. He smiles again, a burst of white in his face, and although he looks frighteningly cold some of the time Martin thinks there's an odd sort of comfort to how he looks, to the inevitability of his nose, the certainty of his brows. "Yes. Don't you want to know?"

"We do," Sasha says. She hasn't sat down, but she does grip the back of her seat with white-knuckled fists. "I've been trying to find out... to find  _ you...  _ for the longest time. Jude didn't know where you were. I asked - I even asked the church, and they didn't know. Where do you go?"

"Archivist, you of all people should know," Oliver looks at her with pity in his eyes, like he can't believe he has to say any of that out loud. "Jon was connected with a wave of death, and undeath, and certain death made uncertain, and life living again. When others have read that Leitner book - and yes, there have been others, many others, Terminus knows them - when they have read the book, maybe the balance of two or three lives is taken, but the scales are wide and the chains are strong and we can cope with them. When Jon read the book, millions that lived died, and a good few that died lived, but the scales are not infallible. The hands shook. In the fog they're hanging, still, because he is strong - he is  _ strong,  _ Martin, because he loves you. If he decides to go for good the scales will drop and I can't reassure you that the world will keep turning when they do, for all the work I will do to keep them hanging. Terminus can’t eat a whole world at once. We need to find Jon."

"Find Jon," murmurs Georgie. She is one of the only ones occupying her chair as though she's comfortable in it, her hand flung over the back and her legs hanging over the arms of it. "And we can find him...  _ where  _ can we find him?"

Oliver turns those eyes on her, now. "Where do you think?"

"He doesn't exist, you said," she glares at him. Her eyes are dark and steely. Martin imagines she must be strong, and look at the muscles under her beautiful shirt, and look at the way her stomach folds under her beautiful dungarees, and look at the way her calves flood into her ankles between her cuff and her socks, and he wonders how strong she is.

_ He is strong, Martin. _

As though Martin needs to know more than anyone else the depths to which someone loves him. The depths to which he is loved.

These pathways feel familiar, as though he's travelled them once before, but he's never had the will to think about the depths to which he is loved, or unloved, in case he hates what he finds in there.

But he is strong, Martin.

"He doesn't exist," Oliver says. Martin remembers his physics teacher in GCSE, an awful Scottish woman with a short blonde bob and flowery skirts who used to talk at them like that when his class didn't immediately grasp the essentials of a formula, or the core of how light reflects off glass. "He doesn't exist, so where is he?"

"Everywhere," says Detective Hussain. Her thumbnails have been painted the sort of green that snakes are, when they hide in the grass and kiss flowers. "And nowhere, but for the purposes of your question, he's everywhere."

Oliver smiles just a little.  _ Top of the class,  _ Martin imagines him saying in the Scottish accent of his physics teacher, and it makes him want to do a sort of hysterical giggle, but he holds it in just in time.

"So he could be  _ here?"  _ Melanie looks over her shoulder like Jon is some sort of ghost that nobody has warned her about, hiding just behind her shoulder ready to pop out and say boo.

"He could be here," Martin says.

He doesn't know how he knows, but he knows.

Tim has been silent this whole time, glaring into the folds of his elbows, clearly thinking about something else a million miles away from a man who now never existed at all. His lip is trapped between his teeth and his brow is deeply furrowed, and he reminds Martin of this advert he once saw on the side of the bus heading down through the city centre past Westminster, an ad for Tesco's F&F of a man wearing swimming trunks and smiling. He had looked an awful lot like Tim, but a little bigger, a little shinier, his smile a little wider.

Weird, sometimes, how coincidences slip your mind. Martin wants Tim to say something, but he doesn't know if he trusts what will come out of his mouth.

"So we call him," Sasha looks from the book in Tim's arms to Martin and away again, the flash of her eyes so quick he might have missed it. "Here? Now?"

"When else?"

Martin has never been hit by a car, or by anything really, but he always imagined that time slowed down for the person being hit, like slow-motion shots on Eastenders. He didn't think it would feel like this. Like nothing more than a rug being wrenched out from underneath his feet, and like the ugly knowledge that when you land it won't be pretty.

**Scene Twenty-One: A Helping Hand**

"A good few that died lived," Tim quotes at the man, Oliver Banks, who has swanned into their office as though he owns it, feeling oddly furious for a reason he can't place. He hates the End almost as much as the Desolation, and always let's Sasha handle the people who come in with cases to do with those entities. He hates the power they assume. Who allowed this  _ Oliver  _ a power over life and death that everyone else is kept away from? Who allowed him above everyone else in London access to knowledge so awful that even the Archivist doesn't know? "A good few that died lived, what does that mean, exactly?"

Oliver turns to him. Martin's eyes have gone all shaded and sad, but Tim has seen him like this before, deep in the throes of an episode he doesn't want to tell them about that he pulls himself out of within twenty minutes as though it never happened at all. In the absence of his revelations, all attention has turned to Tim. "What do you mean?" 

"So you can't balance these scales of yours, whatever the fuck, sure, but who died? Who is alive right now because this Jon guy didn't kill them?"

Melanie King looks oddly uncomfortable at this. Does she remember him, Tim wonders, or does she just know she knew him, like someone from school that pops up with a spouse and two kids in the local Waitrose and asks you how you're getting on these days, while you desperately try and remember what they were called. Weird. 

Oliver shrugs. "Does it matter?"

"You're not telling me, so I really think it does." 

"It can't be anyone we know. I can't imagine that me or Daisy would be very harmed by it, at any rate. I don't come here," Basira says, arms folded, glaring defiantly at Oliver, daring him to deny her. Tim has rarely seen her as shaken as she is now, not even on the (rare) occasions she would storm into the Archive chasing after answers for one case or another she's been assigned.

Oliver shrugs. "I don't feel any of you would benefit from knowing."

"I'm dead," Tim says, just to see him flinch.

He doesn't. He almost does, and there's a twitch there under the eyelid that might have grown into a flinch if given the proper time and care, but Oliver clamps a lid on his movement so firmly that Tim is surprised he loosens himself up enough to walk places without a cane. "What makes you think that?"

"You won't confirm nor deny. I'm dead."  _ And I always knew I would be, hunting Danny,  _ his mind supplies for the privacy of the audience in his head. He would never say that to any of these people, not even to the Sasha he loves so much he almost thinks he could move on, sometimes.

Sometimes when he is very drunk and it is very dark, Tim thinks it's so,  _ so  _ fitting that he will die just as he lived, chasing Danny and always staying two steps behind, always reaching and never catching, always calling and never receiving. And he's dead.

And this Jon that has Martin so shaken that he never comes into work, or comes in dazed, or comes in clutching the book so hard his palms are bruised, and this Jon that has Melanie King crying in the break room, and this Jon that has Sasha going up to Elias when she swore she'd never do it again -

He's killed Tim, in some world that didn't happen.

Oliver just smiles. "I won't confirm nor deny that any of you are alive, or that any of you are dead. That's not my job."

"It's not mine to bring back people who never existed," Tim says. He can see Sasha glaring at him from over Oliver's shoulder, like he's throwing a wrench in all her plans, but then Sasha's glaring weakness has  _ always  _ been the unknown. Of course she would want to find out - she always does.

That's her purpose.

But it isn't Tim's.

"Hear him out," Georgie puts in, voice all shaky and torn, and it's Tim's turn to give  _ her  _ a look of disdain across the room. "No, Tim, I mean it. Mr Banks - Oliver, I mean - what do  _ you  _ get out of all this? Why would you care?"

_ "Why would you care,"  _ Sasha asks, although she doesn't really need to, and her skin flattens to her bones and her eyes are green and she is not really Sasha but the Archivist and then she is Sasha again, the Archivist just behind her face.

The question slips through Oliver's ears, into his skull.

Tim smiles.

Oliver holds out both his hands, palm-up, like he's about to perform a trick. "Death is balance, until it isn't. The End of the world will come and everyone will  _ die,  _ of course they will, but a part of my... task is ensuring that enough people live to continue the cycle of  _ dying.  _ There would be no point in wiping the whole lot of you off the face of the planet in one swoop, because then who would die the next day, and who would fill the belly of the - well, of the beast? That would be foolish. That would be unbalanced. Terminus is not an unbalanced creation. Terminus is a waiting judge."

Tim can't help but roll his eyes. He's never had much time for the evangelical shit that avatars pump out when Sasha asks the questions she needs to get the answers she wants. It reminds him of street preachers, of the Jehovah's Witnesses that stood outside the gates to his university handing pamphlets out to hungover students -  _ give it up,  _ he wants to say,  _ we all have our own gods and yours isn't mine. _

"Terminus is a waiting judge, sure," says Daisy, "But get to the point a little bit quicker, please." She rolls her eyes. The Hunt, Tim would have to say if he was a betting man, and far enough along to have animal in her face, in the way she blinks and in the way she smiles.

Martin is listening now at least. His face is twisted and his eyes are wet, but he's paying attention.

Oliver ignores Daisy. "Jonathan Sims was born prematurely, and the complications from the pregnancy and the long birth meant that his mother Maya had her uterus removed in a secondary operation some months after. This was fine, or would have been, but the surgery was a trauma her body found difficult to cope with, and additionally to that she caught a very bad chest infection from going out in the rain from the hospital door to a taxi a mile away, because her husband Colin was out at work and nobody else was around to pick her up. She died five years later after constant fights with crawling bacteria. Due to Maya's death, Colin Sims was forced to pick up more work as a bricklayer, without the support of her income. He wasn't sleeping well, because Jon was an underdeveloped child and he was a single parent. He slipped on the plastic wrap of the sandwich he'd had for lunch, and fell from the scaffolding around a third-floor window down to the concrete ground below, where his head hit stone and he died almost instantly. Without the existence of Jon, they are both alive and retired now, living in their house in Bournemouth childless but happy. You see?"

"I see," Martin says in that empty voice Tim hates. "Jon did something in the world he was in. He saved it, or he stopped it from ending, or he  _ something-ed  _ it, and millions of people lived. That's what you're talking about, isn't it?"

Oliver smiles. "That's what I'm talking about. That's why I'm doing this. The weight of... all of those lives unlived, or deaths now living, would probably crush me."

"And so it's personal," Tim says.

"I don't think you would respect any other reason."

"I wouldn't  _ believe  _ any other reason."

Oliver looks at him, handsome and off-putting as only he can be. "I wouldn't do you the disservice of trying to lie."

"I know," Tim says. He feels a shudder down his spine; someone walking over his grave. "Thank you, I guess."

  
  


**Scene Twenty-Two: Closer**

Daisy brings Basira with her in the search for a late lunch, after a brief forage into the cupboards of the break-room had turned up nothing but a half-gone packet of hobnobs, a stale box of traybakes, and a sandwich now growing things within its plastic wrap. 

Basira wonders which one of them it is - who stops existing in the world with Jon Sims in it.

If Oliver Banks is to be trusted, that is, which is funny because Basira doesn't trust anyone.

(In the night when she rolls over, one arm already out of the bed, Daisy catches her around the waist so she won't fall, and she is the only woman Basira would allow to touch her that way, weight completely in her hands, the knowledge that Daisy will never let her fall.)

"It must be one of us," she says aloud, as soon as they pass through the main doors to the Institute. Everyone knows that the Archivist has got rid of, or at least neutralised, the Watcher years ago, but all the same that instinct remains to discuss nothing sensitive until you're through the doors. "Mustn't it?"

"Mm," Daisy says. Her face is in the air, her eyes shaded against the soft breeze hitting both of them from down the street. It smells a little of petrol and a little of the bins gone past their collection date, and they're too far from the river for any of that (supposed) freshness to reach them.

"But I don't know how this man would have known either of us."

"Mm."

"I mean, neither of us  _ go  _ to the Institute at all. So where would we have met him?"

"Mm."

"I don't get it," Basira hates not knowing things. She hates not  _ seeing  _ things. "I didn't know Sasha very well before this all blew up, and neither did you at all, and so... but Oliver wouldn't lie. He's got no motivation to lie. Where do you want to get food?"

Daisy closes her eyes and breathes in deeply. There is blood on her lip, from a cut right in the corner, but Basira has always liked to kiss her with a little bit of danger in her mouth, and Daisy has always liked to be kissed as though she's fighting. "I think one of those women is vegetarian," she says after a pause, "And Oliver Banks doesn't eat things that die. Vegan."

"Falafels?"

"Down the street. To the left."

Basira starts walking. She often feels manipulative, making Daisy  _ hunt  _ for things as boring as the next sandwich shop, but she knows her more than anyone else does, and she gets restless without something to occupy her every few days, something to do, something to track down. Blood on the floor, or maybe just the scent of perfume wrapping around the train lines, and she's off and  _ who did that?  _ And what were they thinking? Daisy finds and Basira sees.

Daisy takes the lead, her blue eyes unfocused, her teeth just a little bit too sharp in her cheeks. Basira wonders what she would look like in the world where this Jon still exists. Would she still have her long hair, and would she still let Basira stroke it, run her fingers through the blonde streams to marvel at the difference in the colours? The brown against the cornflower yellow, like something too bright to be real. Basira likes to braid it when it's loose, which isn't very often, and she likes the hums Daisy makes when she does it, more like a cat than a person. Would Basira like the other Daisy, the one influenced by someone that doesn't exist anymore?

"Stop thinking," says Daisy with her eyes shut. Her hand is looped in Basira's elbow, her fingers resting on the cloth of her shirtsleeve, "I can hear you from over here. What's the worst that can happen."

This last part is said quite deadpan. Daisy has never been much for platitudes of the meaningless sort.

"Do you ever wonder," Basira says, pulling Daisy to stop before she crosses at a red light, "Do you ever think about the other life you might have... oh, I don't know, the other person you might have been?"

"No." A heartbeat. "Do you?"

"Not particularly." Basira likes to think she's pretty unchangeable. All she is, all she has at the core of her, is Daisy and the knowledge that she can do things to change the world for the better, and she's never had to wonder what she would be without those things. Daisy and self-belief. That's all she needs to be herself.

"We would know each other." Again, not a question.

Basira does think, sometimes, that Daisy probably has different priorities at the core of her than most people. Daisy, unlike Basira, is aligned so purely with an entity that on bad nights it's hard to see where she ends and the Hunt begins, like a cat twisted up with her tail in her mouth. But she's worked out, over the months and years of their knowing one another, that she is as important to Daisy as Daisy is to her, in their own particular way.

Daisy sighs, and they begin walking again. "You know what you are to me."

"I know," Basira says.

And because they know, they never, ever have to say it out loud.

Why would you? Why would they?

"Falafels are that way," Daisy says, and with the hand that isn't holding Basira's she points, and Basira follows, unquestioning.

Georgie leans against the doorframe of the room she has found Melanie in, and just watches. She looks a lot better than she had when Georgie went over to the flat to get the last of her things and found all those awful photographs that never happened; she looks a lot less stressed, a lot happier, and if Georgie was a betting woman she would put money on Sasha being the cause. The Archivist looks the sort to be very interested in listening, and not very interested in comforting, but maybe that's all Melanie needed - an open ear.

Something she hadn't found in Georgie.

Evidently.

"You may as well come in if you're going to hover," Melanie says. The room is unlabelled, just another storage room piled high with cardboard boxes sealed over with packing tape and labelled with incomprehensible number-codes, but there are a few folding chairs along the wall, and a working lightbulb, so it's actually a lot more homely than most of the rooms the Magnus Institute seems to offer.

Georgie shrugs. "I may as well."

She feels a little bad about the whole thing, now she's been hanging around the Institute and listening to the various collected freaks and spooks talking about the end of the world and the start of the world and the potential of unexisting universes. It makes her feel a little redundant, her with her Facebook page and her official subreddit and her fan discord server, because what  _ really  _ is the point of talking about the haunting of some crappy asylum in Wales when stuff like this is going on in real life, and the people in the know are just -

_ People?  _ Just some guy in a tight t-shirt with a snarky smile, and a man who looks like he's barely clinging to reality right now, and two policewomen who both look so far away from normal that it's shocking they still let them in the Force. An Archivist that seems almost okay until you look into her eyes.

And then Melanie, and Georgie, and a few kisses that never really sparked what they should have.

"What are you thinking about?" Melanie pulls out another folding chair for Georgie, and it almost feels like it used to when they were friends.

Still that little awkwardness, though. That little bit of blame, the  _ you couldn't be enough for me  _ that turns around in Georgie's head like a merry-go-round gone wrong. "Nothing," she says. "Thinking about how weird this is."

"I guess. I just got... used to it. Been talking to Sasha a lot," Melanie chews on the edge of her littlest finger, scrolling through something on her phone, her face lit up from the chin upwards by the bright white light. "Apparently I've got a... like, a  _ vibe  _ with this Stranger. I can... she said it has to work harder to trick me. And Jon stopping existing, that was, like, a collaboration with a few of them. And the Stranger was this one to make everyone who knew him  _ forget,  _ but a few people always slip through the cracks. Lucky me, right?"

"Lucky you," Georgie says.

They sit in silence. Melanie hasn't turned off her phone volume, and so every time she types there's a frenzy of typewriter noises. Clack-clack. Georgie wonders who she's messaging; they share pretty much every friend they have, especially working in an industry as insular as theirs, and Melanie doesn't really put her toe out of the water in any other direction.

Melanie sighs, after a long while. "You seem... are you worried, or something?"

"Do I seem it?"

"Yeah, actually."

"I don't know," Georgie kicks her feet against the props of her chair. How much would she need to kick to knock it down? "I'm thinking about what that man said. What Tim said. About... about people."

"About dying."

"About dying."

Melanie gives her a measured look. "I know I didn't die because I remember him, and there are pictures of you with him, and I - I really don't think you're going to die. And I - I - think we need to do this. I  _ really  _ think we do."

"That guy seems to need it," Georgie smiles a little, or tries to, "That Martin one."

"The one in love."

"I feel... bad. You've got anti-Stranger superpowers, apparently, and everyone else works for the Institute or they're a cop or they're, what, the Grim Reaper, and I'm just here because we broke up at the wrong time. You know?" Georgie raises one shoulder, and hopes she doesn't sound too whiny. A foot in no camp, that's what she is. She could leave with no attachment, and would anyone stop her?

Would anyone care?

"I guess," Melanie tilts her head to the side, considering, phone stowed back in her pocket, all attention on Georgie, and it's a good feeling. Melanie is an intense woman, and Georgie loves that about her. "But isn't that the whole point? So Oliver says we were mates with Jon back when he existed, but I don't know any more about him than you. I just remember the... way he used to look, and the way he took his coffee, and he used to say...  _ Martin  _ all funny. And he... and we... and I remember he used to give really good hugs. And he walked with a stick, or a cane or something, but I don't really remember him. And I - he doesn't feel like a friend. So I know what you mean, but I think we're all in that camp apart from Oliver, Georgie. I really do."

Georgie holds out her hand before she can think to regret it, and there's a heartbeat and Melanie picks up one finger with her crooked pinkie, and they sit there with a foot and a gulf the size of the universe separating them, feet on vinyl flooring, chairs wobbling. "Thanks."

"No problem," Melanie's smile is only a little bit brittle. "Nothing like a fresh ritual to perk me right up."

And Georgie's laughter isn't feigned, and it echoes all through the hallways, and she laughs so hard the worry sneaks away from the corners of her eyes, chased by the creases of Melanie's giggle.

"No matter what?" She says when they've stopped laughing. They used to say it on shoots, before they went on location, just in case the ghost turned out to be real this time. It never was.

Melanie squeezes her hand. "No matter what. I promise."

Sasha waits for Tim outside the loo. She knows he isn't using it, but sometimes it's the only place you can go in the archives for some privacy of the basic, normal sort, a locked door rather than a forcefield keeping all the ever-seeing eyeballs from looking in. Her phone is boring, but then she never was much one for any of that, just a few notifications from a Facebook account she last used two years ago telling her some friends from uni have got together. She wasn't invited. She can't even remember their names.

She has a few texts with Jude, angry, hateful things she doesn't like to look at. Sasha has often thought Jude gets off on it, just another form of destruction to feed her god, but often Sasha is as bored as she knows Jude is and so they write abuse to each other all night long, insults that cut to the bone in both cases.

The last log is a few weeks ago. It isn't a regular thing.

Sasha has Basira's number, and has done for a long time; she's one of the only sectioned police officers that deigns to poke her head through the door of the Institute for any longer than five minutes, although Sasha knows it's more out of utility than any sentimentality on anyone's part. She doesn't have Daisy's. Does Daisy even have a phone?

Their texts are mundane.  _ I am coming in tomorrow/OK. I am coming in tomorrow/OK. Are you around this evening?/Yeah. _

Really Sasha only ever messages Tim, and what does that tell her about her work-life balance? But they were friends long before she was promoted to Head Archivist, back when Gertrude was still living and Elias was still walking and when they were both just interning above ground, two slightly-jaded humanities students in checkered shirts and plaid trousers from the Red Cross, buying each other coffee from the Neros across the street, doing favours for one another, going to the pub when they could afford to, going back to Tim's place usually. Sasha has a drawer over there, underneath his pants and socks. A few bras, a few old t-shirts, some underwear for emergencies. Their texts run a lot deeper and a lot further back.  _ Are you okay/why wouldn't i be/i don't know/are you worried/would you kill me if i was? _

Tim unlocks the door and emerges and his eyes are dry. "Creep," he tells her, shutting the door. "You waiting on the loo or on me?"

"Which do you think?"

"I think you know I'm fine."

Sasha rolls her eyes but follows him anyway as he launches himself down the hall towards the main office again. "Well then I think  _ you  _ know that I know you're not fine. Are you thinking about - are you worried?"

He gives her a dry look over his shoulder. "Do you think I should be?"

"Not the question. Are you?"

"Aren't  _ you?" _

"No," Sasha says, with perhaps a little too much confidence for him, considering. But she knows she isn't the victim of whatever death Jon might have caused, in the world where he's real and not a ghost that lives only in the shadow of Oliver Banks and  _ Martin. _

"No?"

She catches up to him, her hand around his elbow. "Look at it - I'm the Archivist, Tim, so I must still be in the Beholding no matter who gets to be Archivist in the world Jon is in. I'm important. You know I'm important, you know  _ you're  _ important. Neither of us are going to be the ones that die. I don't even think there are  _ any  _ that die, to be honest; that's just Oliver fucking with us, that's just more of his mind games. It wouldn't make sense. He wouldn't trust us to help him. I mean, come on, Tim - me and you! As if either of us are going to die of anything but being killed by the other." She means it as a joke, but she's afraid it doesn't come off that way. She was never very good at being lighthearted.

"You're - you're immortal, Sasha, you're unforgettable," says Tim sourly, but he doesn't shrug her away and he doesn't try and walk away from her, "I'm not worried about you. I just want to know..."

"You won't die," she says softly as the grave. "You'll find him. I know you will."

"Know-know, or just know?"

"Just know," she admits, "But only because you won't-"

"Okay."

They walk in silence, slowly, because Sasha can hear Daisy and Basira back from their lunch run up in the office and she knows Tim has absolutely no desire to interact with any of them yet, no more than she does. She might run the place but she doesn't have to  _ like  _ it, and anyway this is Oliver's event; he can play the generous host for a while.

"Danny's dead," he says at last, voice bouncing off the paint peeling from the water pipes above them. "Don't - don't say you're sorry or anything. Don't - say you didn't know. I know he's dead, I  _ know  _ they got him, but I wonder... if there's an alternate world where this guy Jon existed, and he was the Archivist, is there..."

Is there one where Daniel Stoker never really caught on to the idea of urban exploration, and decided to grow chillies in his windowsill instead? Is there one where Tim went with him, went all the way to the end, and they escaped with nothing more than a funny story to tell at wine and cheese nights? Is there one where they both got caught in the net of the Institute anyway, but as the partnership they never got to be?

"I don't know," Sasha admits. "Would you want there to be?"

Tim shrugs. "I don't know."

They stop right before the closed door to the office. Through the seventies-warped glass in the door, laced with that metal framework so beloved of schools and prefabs, Sasha can see Basira handing brown paper bags out to Martin, to Georgie, to Melanie, something with a green logo on the front that smells vaguely of vegetable soup.

"If I die," Tim says.

"You won't."

"If I die," and he takes her hands in his, and she thinks about the time they slept together and he took her face in his hands and kissed her as though she was as precious as a thousand stars, "If I die will you remember me?"

"You're unforgettable, Timothy Stoker," says Sasha James, and she means it just as much as she's ever meant anything. 

When Martin was choosing his name, he thought about just keeping what it had been. That was a trend in the late nineties, when he was realising some home truths about himself he thought he might be able to ignore at least until he died, and anyway it would have been cool, or, or,  _ fashionable,  _ things Martin has tried and failed to be.

He tried Francis, for a while, after an old uncle on his mother's side, but it fit terribly, and it reminded him of old women. He tried opening his charity-shop find,  _ The Compleat Collection,  _ a group of short stories and poems and plays written by Joyce and West and Eliot and Wilde and the rest, because he was going through a bit of a modernism phase, but all the names there were for big men. Big Men. Gabriel, preaching, Dorian lounging, Harolds and Arnolds and Arthurs with their hands reaching back into the soil of the beginning, lying up on the surety of knowing exactly who they were even before they went looking.

He went back to the name his mother had given him at birth, and he cried in the loos outside his sixth form centre, and he got picked last for the teams when their PE teacher said they could play dodgeball. Sometimes he never managed to be chosen at all.

And one day he was looking out the window of the bus he took to get home from school on Fridays, and he saw the delivery van parked at the front of the chippy, two men with baseball caps and black t-shirts, carrying plastic bags full of chips uncooked in through the chippy doors, guided by the fryer on duty. The van was nothing special, just a Ford Transit with decoration at the sides and on the back, a few phone numbers and a premises address.

_ Martin Thorn & Sons, Potatoes Chipped And Delivered. _

And he had looked at that and thought it was dependable. A business, and sons, and delivery times, and chipped potatoes and delivered potatoes and someone who pronounces the  _ R  _ sound at the end of words sometimes, someone with a pencil stub behind his ear and a clipboard in the front of the van; someone to rely on.

He waited to debut Martin at the next job he picked up, a packer at the egg factory half an hour away, and nobody cared enough to question it. "You look like a Martin," his shift manager had told him, "You'll fit in well here."

He has stood up now from the seat Tim showed him to, and he's at his desk, fiddling with the half-used pad of notes beside the desk lamp. Phone numbers written on it, mostly of people who gave statements and were eager to have replies - as though they would ever get any, but that's none of Martin's business - and email addresses, and the titles of books he's always meant to read but has never got quite around to, and doodles of lips and eyes and curves of noses.

Before Jamie (if Jamie ever existed at all)-

(No, he definitely did. Martin hasn't lost his grip that much on the world around him, not yet.)

(But he hasn’t seen Jamie in months, and the bed is cold at night, and when he rings the home nobody answers.)

Before Jamie, there was a man called Frank. He went to university in Hull, of all places, but he was vaguely condescending about the fact that Martin had never even finished sixth form, or gone to college, or done anything to further himself in life beyond straight-up lying on his CV and in his interviews. He used to write poetry, like Martin liked to, but Frank's was philosophical stuff on the nature of being a gay man in London in the early noughties, on the trials faced him, on all the bricks chucked at him during marches. He used to ask Martin about his  _ struggles.  _ He used to ask Martin what he thought of himself, deep, deep down.

But Jon didn't.

Martin doesn't know Jon, but he  _ knows  _ that Jon didn't. When he thinks about the other Martin in the mirrors and in the car windows and in the spaces that aren't quite an unreality but aren't quite real, he sees a man trusting him to do the right thing.

He thinks that the first time Jon found out that Martin was not Martin by birth, he had just blinked and shrugged and said  _ okay. And how many sugars?  _ And Martin had liked that, and it meant that when they slept both in the same bed for the first time in that cottage in the deepest valleys of the arse-end of Scotland, and Jon had sat up and said very tightly  _ I'm sorry, Martin, but I'm not what you think I am,  _ it had made it easier.

Martin liked to touch Jon's mouth, he thinks, playing with one of the pens on his desk, clicking it open and closed. His lips were always chapped; he had a mild allergy to dust, and he was addicted to those flavoured Vaselines, the metal tubs that clink against pocket change and that gather in heaps between sofa cushions.

Jon liked to kiss his fingertips softly, and then smile. They would read together, Martin thinks, and write notes to one another on the inside of the books Jon brought home from work.

And he misses him.

"I miss him," Martin says aloud to test out the truth of it, and then again, "I miss him I miss him I miss him," and every time he says it it rings truer than the time before.

He thinks he has the edges of Jon, and all he needs to do is fill in the blanks in the middle. The way he took his tea, perhaps, and how his handwriting looked, and whether he was a morning person or if he hogged the blankets and woke up only when noon was approaching. Did he go out often, and was he the life and soul, or did he prefer to stay in with hot chocolate and a book? Did he prefer to sleep on the outside or the inside, and did he cuddle or was he a starfish sort of sleeper or someone who curled up in a ball?

Does he miss Martin, too?

Jon misses Martin. That, he thinks fuzzily between breaths that last for days, will be the thing he regrets most about ceasing to exist; he will miss the way Martin looked at him sometimes like he really, finally knew how much Jon loved him, and it warmed him up from the inside out.

Martin didn't want to go to college, in the first six months after the world stopped having been ended, during that time where Jon was searching for something to keep him alive without having to kill others to do it, during the time when he didn't speak to Georgie or Melanie and he thought about the end of the world and when he closed his eyes he saw green there, and Jonah coming to take his body and use it as just another puppet. Martin had his own trauma. The fog, and men smoking in the distance, and the smell of gun-oil, and the sight of thick cigars.

Instead, he had gotten a secretarial job for a department store somewhere near the centre of town, near enough the UCL campus that Jon had thought it was a cruelty. "You could just do it," he remembers telling Martin, over a cup of tea in the morning, listening to the shipping forecast, "You could just-"

It was the  _ money. _

Jon has always, for as long as he's been an adult, been comfortably well-off. He wasn't as a child. His parents were thoroughly blue collar, and his grandmother was of the strict bread-and-butter British sort, and he never knew any of his mother's side of the family beyond  _ in India somewhere, probably having a better time than we are  _ with the implication that Jon had singlehandedly ruined both his own life and his grandmother's.

She died when he was nineteen, just slowly sliding into the rhythm of things at Oxford, just branching out from the sensible clothes she bought for him in Marks & Sparks and didn't let him exchange for something else. Granny cardigans. His first university boyfriend bought him a woolly sort of coat that went down to his knees and was in all the colours of autumn, and Jon wore it everywhere and loved it, and it was rather a shock to find how much money Bernadette Sims had hidden away in a nest egg she never got to use for fear of the next apocalypse, for fear that the next rainy day would be wetter.

"I'll pay," Jon told him, and Martin said, "No you bloody well won't."

They fought about it. They fought about a lot in the early days.

Martin did the foundation course at the WM College, near enough their flat in Camden that he could pop in and out, and he cut his hours down at the department store so he wasn't running himself as ragged as he might have, if he didn't have Jon sitting in their bed and sniping at him to  _ sit down, Martin, have a cup of tea, you look like you might fall over - _

He applied to UCL with his equivalents, and  _ good  _ equivalents, and pretended he wasn't incredibly stressed about the outcome. Nails bitten further down than they had been in years, and he was increasingly short-tempered by turn and then apologetic, and Jon found little treats bought for him, and notes written in books all sappy and prosey, and Martin massaging his leg for him on bad days, and the radio turned down low when Jon had a migraine.

He got in. Of course he got in.

_ You know all this,  _ Jon wants to shout at the thing in his head,  _ Stop making me remember it all over again. _

He can't remember how Martin looked when he opened his emails at seven in the morning when the results were out, but he remembers how Georgie and Melanie and Daisy (Basira had been in Paris, he thinks, chasing up some contacts from before everything went to hell) all collided into their flat at noon, carrying booze in clinking paper bags from the off-license and Georgie bought him a three-pack of Moleskeine notebooks because Martin has always been a paper snob and Daisy bought him a beautiful Parker fountain pen because Martin has always wanted to be a pen snob and Jon had waited a week, just long enough for Martin to forget, and he'd bought him a signed copy of  _ The City & The City  _ because he knows Martin loves it.

And he went to university. Jon can't remember, lying on his bench in the National Gallery, whether Martin had graduated back when he still existed or if he was still going to class, but he knows it made him happy.

He knows it did. It must have. He got to read books and he got to go to class and talk about them with people who really  _ got  _ it, and he had friends that weren't dead or fucked up or serving a god that fed on the lives of others.

And Jon  _ misses  _ him.

At least by ridding himself of the sin of being born, he can rest easy, or be unexisting easy, in the knowledge that Martin physically can't miss him back. He can't cause Martin any more pain than he already did.

"Jon," says Oliver.

"Go away," says Jon.

"What are you looking at, Jon?"

"Go away," says Jon.

He looks around and there's a man beside him with no face. His hair is grey and his body is grey and his clothes are grey, but his jumper is patterned with those abstract Fair Isle patterns Martin liked to wear in the wintertime.

Is that what Oliver looked like?

"I just want to know what you see, Jon," says the thing sitting beside him on the bench, in a voice no longer Oliver's smooth monotone, but a soft Northern accent a little higher than the usual, going up with uncertainty at the end of the line. "Can you tell me? Can you describe it?"

Jon knows that when he sat down he was in front of one of Turner's big empty seascapes.

Now the frame is empty. The wall behind it is that unpleasant, anonymous light-green that the National Gallery seems to favour, and it smells of wet paint as all art houses seem to do, like the whole building contributes to the piece and not just the thing itself.

"Did he know, do you think?" Jon says very softly. He doesn't want to talk to the thing beside him in case it isn't real.

"Did he know what, Jon?"

"Stop saying my name. I don't - you shouldn't - I don't like you saying my name."

"Did he know what,  _ Archivist?" _

That is worse coming from the voice belonging to the thing on the bench, but Jon is thin and cold and he shivers and he feels the fog in his bones. "Did he know when he was painting it that it would be  _ here?  _ What did he think he was doing?"

"Who?"

Jon points to the frame but the painting still isn't there and he burns ugly-red, or he would if the world had ever had any colour in it, with humiliation. "There used to be a painting there."

"Did there?" The thing on the bench turns its sightless, featureless face towards the frame. "It isn't there any longer. Are you sure?"

"Y-Yes. It was... it was there."

"Did  _ you  _ see it?"

"I did," Jon says. He misses being small enough to be hugged.

"But Jon," says the thing on the bench with a voice that Jon knows he should recognise, "If you never existed, then maybe  _ none  _ of this did. Close your eyes."

"No-"

_ "Close your eyes." _

But the only certainty Jon has in the world anymore is when he opens his eyes. When he closes them, how can he be sure anything is real at all?

When he feels with one arm that still moves into the space beside him, his eyes squeezed firmly shut, he feels nothing but dead space and dampness, and he knows he used to miss something, but he's forgotten their name. 

**Scene Twenty-Three: Terminus**

"What are you doing?"

Oliver ignores both Martin and Tim asking the same question. It's been twenty minutes and all the falafels have been eaten, but so far there's been no more progress on summoning anyone to the office, which was sort of what Martin had thought they would be doing.

"What is he doing?" Tim hisses into Martin's ear.

"I don't know," says Martin helplessly, and the amassed audience in the office continue to watch Oliver on his hands and knees, drawing in chalk on the floor; not the traditional satanic circles and numerologically significant pointed stars Martin is used to seeing in films about this sort of thing, but instead a copy of an intricate frame, like an antique mirror or the sort of thing paintings in galleries wear around them. Even in white chalk it looks frighteningly expensive.

Sasha has closed the door into her office and is talking to someone in there. By the chill in the air and the sound of laughter that isn't quite human, Martin can make the educated guess that it's Michael, or at least, whatever is left of the Michael that the Distortion wears now as a sort of fancy suit.

_ In this world it's still Michael... _

Martin shivers. He hasn't seen the version of himself that isn't him for days now, and he doesn't want to, but he has the most horrible feeling that Oliver will say it's central to the ritual or something like that. It always is.

"You cold?" Tim wraps his arm around Martin and gives him a tight, comforting squeeze. Martin feels the shock of human touch keenly, ever so keenly, and he rests his hand on Tim's knee like that's in any way an equal exchange.

"I'm okay. I'll feel better when this is all... done."

Tim makes a face that is probably supposed to make Martin feel better. "This is all just guff from Oliver, bet you ten to one. We'll all be going home after this and - and laughing about it. Don't worry."

But how can Martin say that he's not? That he knows some of his friends, or maybe all of them, don't make it to the world that Jon is in - that he knows he is different, fundamentally different, due to that life - that he knows things will never be the same, and he will never see Jamie again -

\- Never saw Jamie in the first place -

How can Martin say any of that and justify it?

"I'm not," he says. "I... you're right."

The space inside the chalked frame on the floor looks wobbly, wavery, like it doesn't quite belong to the vinyl and concrete anymore. Daisy and Basira have stopped talking in little hushed snaps now, and are watching Oliver with eyes alike in cold, calculating hunger, and Martin wonders what colour  _ his  _ would be if he had the courage to look into a mirror right now.

Sasha emerges from the office and Michael dribbles fractals after her, wrapped all in his hair and in the ugly orange dressing-gown he's wearing. It's wearing. The long fingers trail on the floor, and the eyes are one blue one red, and when he tips his head back Martin sees a cluster of eyes up his nostrils, like nestling bees. "Hullo, all," says the Distortion brightly, and with one eye he looks at Martin and with the other he looks at Oliver and with his fingers he draws pictures in the air. "Do you want me to get him, then? Now?"

"That would be best," Oliver says.

Martin feels that cold, familiar feeling. He's very used to it. It's the sensation of knowing that the ground is coming out from below him, and he's about to stand up and realise he's forgotten to put trousers on before he came to school - he's sworn in church - he's called someone the wrong name - he's just dropped food on himself before a presentation -

"Him," says Tim from beside Martin. "Who's that?"

Michael and Oliver both ignore the interruption. "Inside here?" Michael asks, pointing with a long, horrible thumbnail at the frame on the ground, "That's very dramatic, Oliver."

"Inside there," says Oliver levelly, "Please."

Martin says nothing.

Michael opens the door inside the picture frame that was always there, and Martin looks at the whistling fog inside with the dreadful knowledge he's going to go in by hook or by crook.  _ What's it going to be? _

"Martin-" Tim catches his sleeve, but Martin shakes him off.

Sasha won't meet his eye. Both the policewomen are staring at him. Melanie looks baffled; Georgie looks like she's watching a film, like she has no stake in the situation and she doesn't really care either way. Tim looks confused.

"I'll see you all on the other side, I suppose," Martin says.

"Martin-"

Michael has started to laugh, and it's a really disquieting sound in the silence of the archives, interrupted only by the rickety fan above the door to stop any moisture getting into the documents. Martin wishes this was happening someplace more dignified, but he supposes this is the best he's going to get, and his mother always told him beggars couldn't be choosers.

"Martin-"

“You’ll need this,” says Oliver, and he hands Martin the book they had taken off him only - and god, was that only an hour ago? - “And I hope… I do hope that you make it. For what it’s worth.”

“Martin-”

"Tell him I went in on my own," Martin says to Sasha, and her eyes are green. They've always been green. "If you see him before I do, tell him I wanted to do this."

She looks -

"I will," Tim puts in, and Sasha looks up and mouths it a beat behind him. "But Martin-"

Martin can't hear anything over the whistling fog in his ears. He walks forward and he ignores Oliver in his suit and he ignores the Distortion in its body and he walks forward and he looks at the wall and then his foot hits empty air and he pitches forward like a ragdoll knocked from its stand and the door swings shut behind him and he's inside the cloud, and maybe he was always inside the cloud, and he can no longer tell what colour his hair was when he last looked in the mirror.

He is very cold.

No, no, that's not right.

He is without heat. He is not uncomfortable in any way because to be uncomfortable would be to feel something, and he can no longer do that, no longer touch the insides of his thumbs with his nerves and know that they're there. He's not cold, but he's not warm. He's just Martin, and even then that's slipping away.

He remembers both sitting at Jon's bedside, smelling the alcohol wipes and thinking about his mother, but at the same time he knows that on that day he went to Blackpool with Jamie and a seagull ate their chips on the boardwalk.

He remembers the end of the world and he remembers screaming until there was blood in his throat, but he also remembers the day Sasha took on Elias and Tim took on Peter Lukas and Lukas died and Elias was drunk by Jonah Magnus.

He remembers the way Peter Lukas would touch him, very softly on the inside of the wrist, to hear Martin's inhalation, and then how he would vanish and say  _ that's quite enough for one week, now,  _ and how Martin would sit at night and count the cars he could hear just to tie himself to the world.

He remembers sleeping with Jamie.

He remembers sleeping beside Jon.

But does he feel anything about either of these things? No, he thinks, he doesn't really. He is aware that he  _ should,  _ but in the fog everything seems slightly silly and juvenile. The fog doesn't care which man he takes to bed with him, or what shape the person he loves is, or who it is on the other end of the phone. The fog only cares that he's within it, not without, and never without, and never to be without.

But Martin remembers the fog from last time, and he is older now, even if he's not wiser.

He reaches his hand out with the fingers he can't feel, and he hooks onto the frame of something... a mirror, or a painting, or perhaps the window of a car on a sunny day, something reflective. It takes all his strength to moor himself onto it, and he can feel where the edges are tearing into the skin of his hands, and he can feel the blood starting to run down his fingers to the divots between them where his knuckles connect. He doesn't mind about any of that, really. That's just what happens.

He pulls himself up onto the frame, and he can feel the edge now under his thumbs and he thinks - he isn't sure, but he thinks - it's a painting of some kind, like the chalked one Oliver was mimicking. That's pretty. The book is still in his hands, as though it had never left his grasp, and the cover is cold and the cloth is frayed and it feels like a familiarity and a loss. Martin looks out onto the world outside the frame. 

Of course he sees him then.

He always knew he would. 

Jon has been looking at the painting for so long he’s finally realised what he finds irritating about it, what specifically about it that means he can’t quite come crawling out of his own skin and away from the real world and into the black blanket of the End. He can’t remember if Oliver directed him to this one or if he was drawn himself, but he knows that when he sat down someone hadn’t painted hands around the frame, like a bad horror film, a ghostly girl coming out of the wall.

Even the National Gallery isn’t safe from graffiti artists, evidently. Who paints over something like that? It’s a wonder they haven’t been caught, really. 

And he’s thinking all this and thinking all this in a daze because he’s never been good at getting to the point, even if the point is his own death - or not, because he’s already died. Or not, because to die you must first have lived, and he has never done that here. 

And he’s thinking all this and watching the hands pull themselves up, and there’s a book in one but Jon doesn’t really notice because why would he, and the hair is both completely white and completely blonde and completely something in between but the eyes are the same warmth as ever. 

Jon stares at Martin, at his Martin (with a little extra) and Martin stares at the only Jon he’s ever known and neither of them can quite believe that that’s the other one right there. 

“Jon,” says Martin just as, “Martin,” says Jon. 

“Which one are you?” Jon asks, his hands by his sides, thinking both about the Martin he left sleeping in bed and the Martin he’s watched in this world, both happier and unhappier without him in it. “Which Martin are - do you know who I am?”

_ “Jon,”  _ Martin repeats with a tone of exasperated fondness Jon holds very dearly, “Of course I know who you are. I’m… Martin.”

Jon takes a step closer but the force of the cold coming from - no, not from Martin, but from the book in Martin’s hand - is so strong he immediately stops. How can he stand it without shivering? “Do you remember me, though? Do you - are you -”

“I’m not quite sure,” Martin admits. He walks a little bit closer. Jon can’t even tell who he is by the clothes he’s wearing; any version of Martin might wear a white shirt and a blue cardigan trimmed with… ducks, or possibly sheep, and little yellow buttons. Any version of Martin might look like this, anxious but brave above anything else, clambering through god-knows-what to get here. “Jon,” he says, “Are you really...”

"Really?" Jon echoes, still a few steps and a mile away from Martin, his voice echoing funny in the room that is the world that is the painting that is the End, "No, I don't think I am anymore."

"Did you...  _ mean  _ to?"

Jon puts his head to one side, considering for a very long beat or two. He can't remember really, but he knows he heard the words he was saying and he hated them and he hated himself for not being able to stop. "I don't think I did. I think... I think it was like with the statements. I stopped being myself and I kept being the Archivist. Does that make it better?"

"Oh, Jon."

Jon missed the way Martin said his name. He wants to ask him to say it again, and another just to make sure, but he thinks that might be weird, or at the very least a little... strong. "What?" He says instead, stiffly, and he wishes he could just say what he wants to.  _ I missed you. Ask me to come home with you. Hold my hand. _

Martin smiles, sad, with his eyes. "I think it makes it better. I just wish - it would stop happening to you. Fool me once and all that, don't you know?"

"I... suppose."

Nobody ever tells you that having your life saved is a bit awkward. Jon stands in the mist, feeling the bench in the National Gallery press against the back of his knees, and hopes that Martin says something to break the silence. He can feel the end kissing the back of his neck, cold lips on the hairs there, telling him to come - to go - to leave this man. "Martin, I..."

"Jon-" Martin starts and then stops. There are two of him when he moves, like one part of him lags slightly behind the other, and so as he reaches forward to Jon, the Martin that is wholly blonde, the Martin that looks worried and frightened, stays in place for a heartbeat before his hand reaches forward too, into the space that  _ Jon's  _ Martin had just occupied, "Jon, I miss you."

Jon always admired Martin for his - honesty, with things like that.

He was brought up by his grandmother (but you know that) and to her, an emotion was something to be left at the front door with the muddy boots, to be regarded at a safe distance with distaste. Emotion, especially of the tender and soft stuff, was to be left in the realm of the TV and the books she piled onto him to keep him quiet in the evenings.

Martin was always roughly, rebelliously emotional. "I love you," he would tell Jon when they were in the Co-Op just to make Jon know, and, "I love you," he would tell Jon when they were sitting together and Jon was picking his dinner out of his teeth and making very unattractive faces, and, "I miss you," he would tell Jon, standing in front of him with his hand out and his eyes empty of tears and his face empty of anything at all, in the - limbo before the End.

"I miss you too, I think," Jon whispers, although he can feel his throat closing up around the words, like it might not be real at all.

Does he miss Martin? Does he really?

He knows he used to like him. Used to love him, probably. Martin would massage his leg on bad days, and encourage him to see his friends on worse days, and tuck him into bed on the  _ worst  _ days and leave a cool flannel on his forehead and stay home from class to read novels in his best voices. Jon admired him for his bravery, and his intelligence, and for the way he looked when he dressed up for dinners out, and for the way he looked asleep with his hands over his chest, and for the way he would sometimes look at Jon with indescribable sweetness.

Martin holds out the book. "I read the end, you know."

_ The End.  _ Jon shivers. "Are you cold?"

Martin ignores him, and opens the book from the back inwards. "In Death," he says, and the voice he's doing is sonorous and deep, "Even then we sin."

"I don't want to-" Jon stumbles backwards, expecting to find the bench, but he's just falling through mist and he falls, and there's a feeling in his leg he hasn't felt for months, and he sprawls with his hands out uselessly to catch him. What's left of him. "Don't read it, I don't want to hear it-"

_ "We leave behind a hole, an imperfect impression on the world that you no longer inhabit. This hole cannot be filled. This hole is permanent. The Sin of Death is forever, and your agency exists with you in the world beyond this one that does not exist, and so you create a hole in the world that will forever be left, made by your mistakes." _

"I don't want to hear it," Jon says, "Martin-"

"I have to read it," Martin says, "I'm sorry."

The mist creeps ever-inward. Jon thinks about Tim. He hasn't thought about Tim in months; it makes him feel sick, and it makes his leg hurt, and it makes him want to say cruel things to people just to see what they do.

_ "People do not forget. You leave behind a hole and you leave behind a hurt and the people around you experience negativity and the world you left behind is worse for you leaving with work undone. You cannot undo the Sin of Death. It is final, irrefutable, and unforgivable to commit the Sin of Death, and yet day by day the selfish commit it in their hordes." _

"The selfish," Jon whispers. He thinks about Daisy, and about how happy she had been to see him, that night before he read the book in the world where he had existed.

Daisy had been his best friend, he thinks. They would meet sometimes, and talk seldom, and sometimes she would have a book of puzzles and they would do half a crossword in Starbucks and she would kick him, under the table, and he would know she was trying to thank him, but he would never know what for.

_ "People will think of you for years to come, if you commit the Sin of Death. They will lie about you and they will hate you in their deepness, but it will be forbidden for them to think anything but good for you, and thus the Sin of Death leads to lying, and bitterness, and hatred through the generations." _

Jon thinks about Basira.

He had loved the shop, and the space they occupied in the community that was building itself in London, in the wake of the end of the world that wasn't. Neither of them needed to talk much, and both of them found ways to feed the Eye without hurting anyone but themselves, but he loved her - he  _ did  _ love her - and the smell of tea and rain, and her cat in the windowsill.

_ "People will miss you. People will mourn you. The hole will widen over the years, repeated a thousandfold in the people that knew you, a thousand holes in a thousand hearts." _

Georgie had been quiet, and slow to come back to him after the end of the world, and Jon hadn't blamed her. He thought the bridge had been burnt completely after the hospital, after the monster, and especially after his frantic visit to her apartment to beg for anyone's help. He thought he had finally outstayed his welcome.

She had apologised, but he hadn't known why. He had apologised, too. She had kissed him on the cheek and looked sad, but she came to games night and she didn't say anything and she had... remained his friend.

Martin looks at him all the while.

The mist is thicker, now, and stronger, and it's pulling at Jon's ankles.

_ "The Sin of Death is worse than the Sin of Life. You Sin constantly. What is the Nature of the Sin you are committing now, Archivist, lying on the ground without any agency at all?" _

Sasha hadn't any agency at all. He doesn't want to take it away from her, Head Archivist, the one Gertrude had envisioned for the job, the one that managed to get both Lukas and Elias without anyone she loved dying - without the world ending - without being eaten by an entity with no regard for her. He wishes he had more pictures of her, beyond the blurry film snap hanging up by the hall in his flat with Martin.

_ "The Archivist has nothing inside him anymore,"  _ says whoever wrote the book before Leitner printed it in his library, through Martin's throat,  _ "The Archivist is used; the Archivist is spent. What will the Archivist do, we wonder? Will he continue to Sin, or will he go to the End, the realm where nothing can be wrong because there is no wrong to exist?" _

Melanie had forgiven him, for everything he'd done, the pair of them sitting with their canes, holding hands on a park bench. She'd said she was sorry, and she'd said she thought he was funny, and she wanted to try being friends without any of the baggage.

And they had been.

That's the thing - Jon had  _ succeeded,  _ for a while, and he'd had a life and friends and he'd been happy -

_ "The Archivist is used up and empty, and there is a new Archivist now, and the Beholding does not covet avatars as some are wont to do. Why are you still here, Archivist? Why do you persevere, when nobody wants you at all?" _

And Martin is here, just as he always is, with his hand out.

"I'm sorry," Jon whispers up at him, as though that will make anything better, "Martin, I-"

"Don't make me decide," Martin says, and he doesn't move forward, watching Jon struggle to his feet; the fog is so thick between them that Jon really doubts he could, even if he wanted to, "Don't make me - don't make me, don't put it on me to put the world back -  _ don't.  _ I love you, Jon, but I won't - I can't save you. I can't stop you. You have to pick for yourself."

"Sasha and Tim-"

"Jonathan Sims," Martin interrupts. He's still holding the book open, but he's not looking down at the pages. "You have to pick."

Behind him, Jon knows if he turns he will see the thick mist curling into a blackness, a space of darkness so deep that it hasn't any colour to it at all.

Before him, there is Martin.

Either way there is a sin, of one kind or another, and a world where someone is hurt, and a world where someone is dead, and a world where someone is filled with a hole that can never be made right again.

Martin's hand is out, and his fingers are shaking, but he's moving as one with two bodies, and his eyes are perfectly dry.

The End is warm and inviting.

Jon takes a step.

  
  


**Epilogue: Library Card (Reprise)**

After a few months, Trevor remembers where he bought most of his coursebooks, and he can’t really believe he ever forgot. 

It was that poky little place with the cat in the window, and the weird guy who served him, down in Camden - that had taken ages to get to, but it had been sort of worth it on the recommendation from Martin Blackthorn or  _ whatever.  _ And he's just been handed the reading list for third year, and honestly the books there are a fucking joke, and he and Sylvie are lying on his bed passing a joint between them and complaining, and he remembers.

"I know a second-hand place that could give us the books  _ really  _ cheap," he says, sitting up suddenly and wishing he hadn't, the rush to his head making his eyes water.

Sylvie sits up as well, but slower, knocking the ash from the end of the joint into her empty mug on the head of her bed. They’ve stopped up the fire alarm with a sock, so they can smoke indoors. "Oh, yeah? Where?"

"It's called..." Trevor wracks his brains, "The...  _ Book Shop?  _ Something really weird. Something like that. Owned by a bit of a freak, but it's okay, down in Camden where all the hippy places are. Martin Whatsisface showed me how to get there last year. It'll take a while, but we'd probably save, like, fifty quid on that list, knowing Blackwells."

"Are you gonna go?"

"Think so. He drew a map in my  _ Norton,  _ I think."

Sylvie swings her legs off the side of the bed. "Let's make it a day trip, Trev, how about it?"

Which takes them to here, another drizzly day in August in London, Trevor's t-shirt sticking uncomfortably to his back, Sylvie complaining about how her backpack is making her shoulders sweat, dodging tourists until they aren't anymore and there's nobody in the streets at all and the fog has got heavier. It's just the low cloud on the south of England, of course, but there's something eerie about how quiet the streets are even this deep into the warren of old London. Trevor is glad he has Sylvie with him this time, just to keep his head screwed on, or else he'd be pretty jumpy by now - squeaking at shadows.

Sylvie has just moved on to complaining about how lost they are when Trevor sees it, and grabs her elbow.  _ "That's  _ where I was talking about. See?"

Just beside the shut coffee shop and the hot pot place, exactly as it had been when he had visited a few months ago for his coursebooks.  _ The Book Shop,  _ duck-egg blue, the cat sleeping on the chair in the window with its paws over its nose.

"Huh," says Sylvie quietly. "That's fucking... cursed."

"I  _ know.  _ Wanna come in with me?"

"I'm not staying out on this fucking street on my own."

"Fair enough." Trevor shoulders his backpack, wincing at the slick sweat as the straps slide over his arms. "Ew - okay. Let's go."

The bell above the door rings in a tone a little higher than usual, and as before the shop is cluttered, covered in books, the low tables and the shelves and the heaps of them on the ground, and the place smells of cups of tea and old paper and printing-press ink. Dickens and old English textbooks and books with titles in... Arabic, Trevor thinks, and file folders full of paper, and a few records in their cardboard sleeves, and the cat still sleeping. "Woah," Sylvie whispers to him, "That's a theme, for sure. Shabby chic."

"There's a guy somewhere here," Trevor says back, in the same undertone.

There's a woman who comes out first, though, from the door into some back room. She's wearing a dark dress belted at the waist, and a matching hijab, glasses nestled over her sharp nose, a heap of four or five books in her arms. She looks startled to see them. "Good - morning. Yes, good morning. Can I help you at all? Were you looking for something in particular?"

"We're in the same class," Sylvie says, when Trevor doesn't reply; he's a little shocked, although he doesn't know why, to see someone that isn't Cardigan Man. Cardigan Man had seemed to be the only one left in the world, when last he'd visited. "Martin Black...wood gave us the recommendation, said you could get us a few books secondhand? I wrote out the list. We need... um, one each. From this." She takes a sticky note out of her pocket and passes it to the woman.

"Oh,  _ Martin  _ sent you," the woman brightens considerably at this, and Trevor regrets not namedropping the first time he was here, "Well that makes a lot more sense. You're students, then? Do you know him well?"

"He's in class with us," Sylvie says, smiling a little awkwardly, "But he keeps to himself. He's nice, though."

"Is the other guy here?" Trevor interrupts and instantly feels foolish. The bookshop woman has that air about her, like she knows so much more than he ever will - than he ever  _ can.  _ "The... I came here before. He had hair down to  _ here,  _ kinda salt and peppery? Green jumper."

The woman moves over to one of the book-covered tables, looking a lot more at ease now she knows where they've come from and what they want. "You mean Jon. He's away at the minute - him and Martin are taking a bit of time off."

Trevor looks at Sylvie, knowing a juicy bit of class gossip they'll chew over with their housemates when they get back. "I didn't know Martin was...  _ going out  _ with him," he says carefully, watching Sylvie (out of sight of the woman) slowly cram her fist into her mouth.

"Oh, yes," the woman says unconcerned, "For several years now. They've gone up to Scotland for the month, though, just for a little break; they had a rather stressful few weeks, but that's all over. Me and my partner have a property up there, you see."

"Of course," says Trevor, like this isn't the most interesting thing to have happened to him since the mushrooms started growing out of his shower.

"Now, about these books..."

Life goes on.

And Jon lies in bed, because it  _ is  _ only twenty past five in the morning and that's awfully early to wake up just for the shipping forecast. His hair splays out against the pillow - his eyes are shut, his lashes curving over his cheeks, the old, silvery scars down one side of his face adding to the odd beauty of him, the most wondrous man Martin has ever seen.

Martin takes his hand and kisses it, and Jon makes a noise in his sleep.

In the mirror, his reflection smiles back at him, and his hair is completely white, and his eyes are completely satisfied, and he knows that he's in the right place at last.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading/listening! your support means the world <3


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